“The artwork of René Jolink plays a game with the human capacity and yearning for optical noise in patterns and images”.

Through the years, René Jolink has developed a unique painting technique. It is the quality of his exceedingly laborious method that lends his subjects their timeless and dreamy character. A man seems to dance, a lonely tree, a landscape; they appear to us as an imprint of reality: a memory called into being. Far from reality but close in terms of feeling, Jolink’s subjects evoke an atmosphere that is suggestive rather than revealing.

Like a photographer in a dark room, René Jolink seems to bring his image to life in a slow process. His paintings are indeed reminiscent of photographic impressions: partly through his carving and scraping into wet layers of paint, the depiction emerges in the recess; and also through a form of frottage, by which an imprint is made from a painted image underneath the canvas. Both are comparable to the negative in photography.

In cooperation with Klerkx Art Management.