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Anyone who is familiar
with Jaap van den Ende's earlier formal, often abstract geometric work can see
a radical U-turn in his current work based on flowers, landscapes and human figures. Jaap
van den Ende started work on these emotionally charged paintings in which the figuration
plays an important part in the late Eighties. All the same, his present-day procedure is
still in line with the so-called 'cool' work of the Sixties and Seventies. Oppositions
like reason and emotion, or that between system and intuition in his style of work, had
already been present for a long time. It is just that he has developed different formal
idioms for these premises during the last few years.
Jaap van den Ende's paintings are
built up in layers, although the visual elements are interwoven rather than superimposed
on one another. The images pass one another by on their way. The viewer can no longer
determine which was the first layer in a painting. Jaap van den Ende allows all kinds of
figurations to flow through one another, but this takes place within a determined system.
So in fact he continues to systematize the picture, except that it is now much more
important for the composition to be 'emotionally' clear instead of 'geometrically' so, as
it was in the earlier work. This layered structure also contributes to the spatial
dimension of the work, in which the two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality of the
image as such and of the various pictorial elements which compose it are treated in a
highly complex manner.
The artist's themes range from flowers and leaves, outdoor and spatial environments, on
the one hand, to more aggressive depictions of human relationships, on the other. Jaap van
den Ende is primarily painting his thoughts, whether they are the scent of flowers or a
modern landscape fragmented by urbanisation. His paintings engage in a dialogue with these
ideas, which are portrayed in a non-hierarchical setting. Jaap van den Ende paints with
the flexibility of thought itself in an extremely agile interaction with the unpredictable
speed of the eye of the spectator.
© Gabriëlle Nederend
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