STAN VAN STEENDAM

THOROUGHFARE

ON VIEW 07.11.24 - 08.17.24

CARVALHO PARK announces the opening of Thoroughfare, Belgian artist Stan Van Steendam’s debut exhibition with the gallery. Through eight new paintings of layered plaster and pigments on wood panels, lending their sculptural physicality, Van Steendam offers physical form to light’s ephemerality. This preoccupation is at the heart of his practice, but to focus solely on light would be to miss his attention to the materiality of these works. Diptych and triptych formats emphasize the constructedness of his chosen support, while also gently alluding to the spiritual aspects of art’s history. Without the symbols, or the spectacular displays of faith, wealth, and suffering — if such scenes were pared back to the essentials of color and light, what fundamental emotional information would remain? The high notes of ecstasy, the steadying beat of devotion, and much else, are coiled within Van Steendam’s chosen form.

A triptych in pale greens and blues resembles water suffused with light. The title, however, Close Call, suggests not an aquatic environment but a narrow escape from some calamity. Not only that, but also a voice beckoning, an invitation to intimacy. Such ambiguity abounds in Van Steendam’s minimalist yet affectingly expressive works. The shades are natural and evoke the organic — these are tinctures of moss, blooming petal, and morning sky — but there is rarely anything concrete. Occasionally, a recognizable natural form appears to push through, as in Cucumber Cubes, where square subsets resemble a tree trunk cut through the middle to determine its age, each ring referring to an era of life.

Largely, though, Van Steendam abandons figurative representation and instead focuses upon light, its pulse and reorganizing capabilities, its transformative effects. Working from his studio in Lisbon, oriented towards the sun and its movements, it is no surprise that Van Steendam is instinctually drawn to light. Electric Teepee presents a translucent square of mint green, a silken latticework through which foamy white light glints, bringing to mind a vast backlit pane of glass. Impressions of this kind accumulate with sustained observation. Coral pink flecks and ribbons of viridian green give Electric Teepee the feel of a sky marked by the aurora borealis or a nebula floating through space. What else? A large field bordered with hedges, long grass and wildflowers through which wind gently moves. A pond, meadows, a wall covered in moss. Frames and Wheels, another diptych structure, is organized into a grid similar to that of Cucumber Cubes, and both suggest the patterns made by light through window shades, their bands of color vibrating to subtly different rhythms. Pillow Talk and Impossible Dreams situate us in early mornings or late nights as a hymn to light’s various atmospheric effects, its daily spectacular choreography: sunrises, sunsets; darkness illuminated by starlight.

These meditations on color inevitably address a history of its theorizing. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors (1810), the poet states that color is not simply an effect of light, a visual phenomenon, but an emotional force too. Goethe proceeds to identify the affective characteristics of colors and their admixtures: yellow brings joy, for instance, while red-blue disturbs. In Van Steendam’s paintings, color is so multitudinous it is impossible to obey any single tenet set forth by Goethe’s color psychologies. In Close Call, streaks of dusky blues, chartreuse, sage green, tangerine and violet touch and intertwine. If, as Goethe argues, ‘particular colors excite particular states of feeling,’ what emotion arises from turquoise that melts into red? The answer is ambiguous, shifting, but that uncertainty is part of these paintings’ pleasures. Following Goethe’s linking of color and feeling, you might say that filling these paintings with such a wealth of different colors instils them with a huge chorus of different energies, emotions and ideas. A daub of carrot orange, like those which move across Tire Shop, might provoke happiness only for a cerulean blue to overtake that emotion moments later, the eye having moved elsewhere. As in the natural world, which is vulnerable to atmospheric changes and quotidian planetary shifts, in Van Steendam’s paintings transformations are commonplace. Yet the cumulative effect is not of disquiet, but of repletion: all forms of life and its flourishing are accounted for — even if as flashes, samples, glimmering fragments — in these paintings.

Each work has this urgent sense of the present, of engaging a viewer’s mind and sensory capacities. At the same time, these paintings possess a historical quality in as much as they bear traces of their own long processes of composition. Works are built up with layers of raw pigment and plaster, creating transparencies through which some of the earliest gestures are visible underneath its final touches. Van Steendam’s hand is visible, in other words, and the result are paintings whose tactility lends them a remarkable sense of intimacy. Such closeness might feel unexpected in works that are in some key sense enigmatic, eluding conventional description, eschewing narrative. Mysticism clings to these work’s edges almost by chance or accident. In certain moods, they can appear like portals to other worlds. Bands of color have an architectural aspect that brings to mind thresholds real and imagined. Color appears to tremble and waver, as though it were a substance that might be entered, as though a strange gravity were dragging you inside.

Yet these works are always suffused with references to real places Van Steendam has visited, lived or worked. The vast and empty skies of Marfa, its distinctive oranges and pinks, colors through which it is impossible not to feel the desert’s heat, act as a backdrop to Impossible Dreams and Pillow Talk. Van Steendam’s travels in Egypt gently influence several of the works in this presentation but feel especially pertinent to Frames and Wheels and Cucumber Cubes. Vividly preserved painted tombs of the pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings reveal the vibrancy of ancient artists’ range of colors, and something of this vividness is reflected in Van Steendam’s palette. In the desert, along the banks of the Nile River, in Lisbon; in pastures, oceans, skies and glittering celestial bodies. Van Steendam ranges across these terrains, but no matter where his painting takes us, he always delivers on vivid, sensual color experiments and the endlessly fascinating play of light.

Text by Rebecca Birrell, PhD, Leverhulme Trust Fellow at The University of St Andrews and Curator, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Stan Van Steendam (b. 1985) is a Belgian artist who lives and works between Lisbon and Brussels. His research, rooted in intuition, seeks to dismantle the materiality of painting through a process that involves layering raw pigments, plaster, and epoxy resin on wood. The installation of his objects evokes an architectural heritage, offering an inherent invitation to explore concepts of entrance, access, and exit. Traditionally associated with functionality, these ideas transform into metaphors through the viewer’s shared experiences. Van Steendam holds a BA and MA in Visual Arts from Luca School of Arts, Ghent, Belgium. Significant solo and two-person shows have been held at CARVALHO PARK, New York, (2024); Barbé, Ghent, Belgium (2023, 2022); Jacob Bjorn Gallery, Aarhus, Denmark (2022); Uma Lulik, Lisbon, Portugal (2022); G/ART/EN, Como, Italy (2021); Galería Nordés, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2021); Bjorn & Gundorph Gallery, Aarhus, Denmark (2021, 2020); Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2020); and Archiraar, Brussels, Belgium (2019). Van Steendam has been a resident artist at Fondation CAB, Brussels, Belgium (2024); Marfa, Texas (2023); Valke Vleug, Puurs, Belgium (2021); and Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2019); among others. Publications include parallel, with an essay by Eugene Binder, alongside Barbé Gallery (2023); artist book Dust Road (2021); and além, with an essay by Alex Bacon (2020).

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