Johannes Steendam

Dripping
2021
used motor oil on paper
70x100 cm
Oilfield- intersection
2021
used motor oil on paper
40x30 cm
Oilfield
2020
used motoroil on paper
70x100
Drippings
2021
used motoroil on paper
70x100 cm

 

It’s About TIme- this art fair.

 

Used proverbial to say: finally, it took long enough. At the same time it is literally about time as well as indirectly to the contemporary. Finally, we are in the contemporary. 

As in ‘it’ is finally here, is in it the current times a strong emotion that is build up by the limitations and restraints that were laid upon us. Time is the one and only unstoppable force. Time is linear, or is it. Time has no emotions and time is not human. 

Between conservative, the preservation of time, trying to somehow stop it from preceding, against progresive. It’s of working against time or going with it. Who is conservative, is afraid of an inevitable change. Time can not be stopped. We see time as moving forward. Time is open.

OIlfields/artist aprouch

Finding new routes and expressionism led to making Oilfileds from 2014 on. The Oilfields are abstract compositions of lines and fields made with used motor oils on paper. An unusual medium, but a medium nonetheless, that has had its journey through time on this planet and is part of the journey in time. But onlooking the oilfields it also resonates and on a personal, individual, level. And as an artist to gain knowledge through working and painting with this new material. To what can be discovered through painting and creating images. About looking and contemplating.

 

For it is so much more than just the unusual medium, the love for the experiment proceeds in finding out how it can be used to create a layered artform, with depth, adding to the fast and global art collection and the styles through art history. To find its place inside the diverend art forms and plasticism. So that is where time and space meet each other. Comparing the work with the predecessors in art and between the works themself. In a form of repetition, it is all the same but they are all different. I do not find it be about the surface but more what lays behind. Hence maybe also the landscape association.  

 

The fluidity of the oils and the different ochre like tones create an unsharp photo like image with atmospheric depths. It is about painting, with a close relation to watercoloring, using different brushes, thickness and amount of the medium brought to surface. The choice of leaving white spaces in between or adding layers on top.This character of the medium also enables the artist to create lines without painting them physically, they appear by time on how the oil is absorbed by the paper. The spaces that get created by this process between the lines and strokes generate a contrast of transparency, lightness versus dark, above and beyond. 

 

The fluidity is a tool that comes from the medium that I believe to have mastered. It is a tool that I use to create these hard and soft edges. I have an amount of control and there is a limit to that control. There is always this part where the medium does it on it’s own. You could say that the medium finishes the piece. And I like that all very much. 

 

Although I call the Oilfields abstract, and they are, there is a close relation to the landscapes An are often perceived as suge. The choice of layers and and lines makes all the difference in the composition next to ‘color’ and the fluidity.

www.instagram.com/jlmsteendam/
Dripping
2021
used motor oil on paper
70x100 cm
Oilfield- intersection
2021
used motor oil on paper
40x30 cm
Oilfield
2020
used motoroil on paper
70x100
Drippings
2021
used motoroil on paper
70x100 cm