Juxtapoz Magazine - Preview: Chris Berens

Preview: Chris Berens
Tuesday December 09, 2008

The first US showing by Netherlands artist Chris Berens comes to Seattle's Roq La Rue this Friday, December 12th, 2008 for a solo exhibit titled Go West.

Currently based in Amsterdam, Berens is an expert, almost photo realistic painter who doesn’t use traditional media, but creates compellingly executed, enigmatic, and emotionally resonant paintings.

His work features a fantastical mélange of exotic creatures and 18th century imagery, floating in buttermilk colored clouds or silvery sea blues. Photo realistic, totem-like animals and distorted childlike people float like dreams through blurry surrealistic European cityscapes or drift on stormy seas on decrepit ships in a soft focus haze, shimmering as if in a fevered dream. It is almost shocking to look at, but in the gentlest of ways.

Beyond the wondrous imagery there is another startling and unusual aspect to Chris work, in which the smooth, translucent look of the his medium of choice (ink on thin plastic over wood panel) is contrasted with fact that the paintings are patch worked together, in pieces ranging from 1 to 3 inches across. Each section has been painted numerous times and layered over each other and each segment flows seamlessly into each other, creating a cohesive image. This technique creates images with such depth, that along with his soft focus look and technical perfection make most people assume they are seeing digital imagery or manipulated photographs (at least when seeing it on a printed page or on a computer screen- in person the work has the “artist’s hand”- a sense of aliveness digital work can not capture). However it is entirely created and painted by hand with painstaking skill, time, and precision from beginning to end.

Creating in a fashion akin to automatic surrealistic style, Chris’ compositions are never planned beforehand, but rather grow organically from section to section. He says that anytime he plans something out or has a specific thing he wants to create it never turns out, and that when he finds himself actively thinking he quickly has to stop working.

For his show at Roq La Rue, Chris created an exhibition of over 30 paintings, all loosely based on the artist's trip from Amsterdam to Seattle, the journey from the old world to the new.