Geer van Velde

Catalogue published for the exhibition “Geer van Velde” (16th May – 15th July, 2012).

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Lydia Harambourg, art historian, art critic, writer and curator.

“Geer van Velde, an alchemist of light, uses the vibration of colour and matter to make space tangible.”

Geer van Velde’s painting radiates a subdued sensibility and a silence that slowly imposes itself on those who look at it. And yet, Samuel Beckett, his faithful friend, wrote that his painting “is excessively reticent,” and that it “acts by irradiations which one senses are defensive.” However much it may have been thought out, it was no less porous to the life it fertilised, a life spent in solitude to preserve a fervent, introspective work, closed in on itself. The artist conducted his serene and luminous work by withdrawing from the world, in “a merciless struggle,” as he confided. A battle he engaged in early on with the canvas, animated by a consciously-exercised asceticism. This dealt with the perception of the image as an objective reality, where the purpose of the painting is to break with this represented image, in favour of the luminous and yet invisible spatial exteriority. A long quest that passes through the successive states of an “object” until it stabilises in space.