Cringe Beauty

First of all, we wanted to understand what drives Christian Rex van Minnen to paint and to continue: is he dissatisfied in any way? He’s categorical: no lack whatsoever. For every time he gives of himself, he receives more in return. He evokes a process of self-revelation, which never ceases to verify itself, despite the fear, the insecurity even, that can pass through him. When he succeeds in overcoming a certain sense of doubt that may arise, he must admit that he receives more than he has given or even lost: value increases in such a generative process. Painting has, in fact, given him more than he could have foreseen, more than he could have imagined; and it continues to do so. Something is added from his act, and this is counter-intuitive to the idea of entropy. Is it order that adds up to and that counters disorder? Anything but. On the contrary, in fact, he senses a constant force which destabilizes order (he calls it “dynamic confusion”), which he contrasts with catatonia: faced with this threat of devitalization, the painter struggles on. Life explodes in front of his backgrounds, often made of granite, which are the stuff of petrification: funerary stele of rejected life, still lifes neither dead nor nature. But if entropy is a loss of energy, here, on the contrary, he sees a gain in energy.