Museum Het Domein (Sittard, the Netherlands) and DSM present Echoes, the first
solo museum exhibition of the work of Jowan van Barneveld (b. 1978, Veghel), a
visual artist and musician living in Sittard. Van Barneveld is best known for
his dark paintings made up of layers of black acrylic paint, which only
gradually reveal themselves to the viewer. As you look at these monochrome
works, figurative elements slowly appear. In addition to paintings from the
past four years, the exhibition also includes a new installation, created by
the artist specially for the occasion.
Since 2005, Van Barneveld has reached a kind of degree zero in his paintings –
as if each one were his last. Both the subjects he chooses and his use of
paint have an impersonal quality. The painter tends to draw his themes from
anonymous or obscure sources on the Internet. In his oeuvre, landscapes
alternate with subjects from pop music. Most of all, Van Barneveld is
fascinated with Kurt Cobain, who sang in the band Nirvana. ‘There was
something at stake in his music,’ Van Barneveld says. The circumstances of
Cobain’s untimely death have never been fully explained. For his exhibition at
DSM Van Barneveld built an installation, a stage on which he regularly appears
with his stoner rockband Viberider. He has taken photos prior to performances
by his stoner rock band, from the wings of the stage where he was about to
perform. Van Barneveld renders all of his themes in thin layers of black
acrylic glaze on canvas, denying himself any personal ‘handwriting’. Ad
Reinhardt meets Gerhard Richter.
Van Barneveld’s work occupies a space between appearance and disappearance.
Only with difficulty do the images emerge from the paint. Despite his
detached, anonymous working method, he seems primarily interested in the
expressive power that the medium of painting offers to today’s artists. In his
sultry nature scenes, log cabins where suicides were once committed, and rock
venues crackling with pre-performance tension, Van Barneveld seems to be in
search of modern-day images of the sublime, places into which we can dissolve
or disappear – in the words of the artist, ‘places that are
bigger than we are’.
