Bursting the Bubble

One of the last shows I’ve seen in person before the upcoming summer break was Jordy van den Nieuwendijk's solo show, which opened a few weeks ago at Marian Cramer Projects in Amsterdam. As the show text says, the exhibition brings together 15 new paintings created during a period of constant movement among six homes over six months. From Melbourne to Moss Vale, Berrima, Sydney, and Bristol, the artist and his family experienced different places they’d call home, and this body of work focuses on conveying a sense of that particular Bubble.

Over the centuries, artists often painted, captured, or portrayed what home is. Interiors, exteriors, household items, views through the windows, and the people with them are all elements that represent it and often carry significant emotional weight and meaning. But what happens when this changes frequently, and all those elements become a visual puzzle? Experiencing frequent moves alongside his partner and their son, van den Nieuwendijk has decided to use this trippy dynamic as the core of this new body of work.

Dominated by a simple structure of what one would recognize as a house, his paintings employ painterly freedom and its endless potential to convey a sense of the confusion and bizarreness of their predicament. Working with fairly sharp, graphic shapes, defined w bold, solid colors, van den Nieuwendijk is purposely using dry oils to build rich surfaces and leaving the fuzzy edges showing the beauty of the human hand’s imperfection. By assembling colors and shapes, he is puzzling the imagery in which perspective, scale, or any sense of common logic is up for negotiation. Within those visuals, the light and shadow, structures, celestial bodies, and light glows become protagonists in a vibrant jamboree which feels comforting, inviting, but w almost a psychedelic undertone. —Saša Bogojev