When I sat down with Arjen this past summer, for a feature in our Fall 2023 Quarterly, I didn't know his newest solo show was going to be called The Joy of the Incomprehensible. But that seems apt. There is something imcomprehensible about Arjen: the name, the images he evokes, the absurdity of the shapes he paints. The Dutch painter opens a solo show at Richard Heller Gallery this week, I was thinking of something he told me, about his life as a musician and how it applies to being a painter. "As a musician, I’m used to transforming emotions and characters into sound. As an artist, a similar process leads to an image. That’s how my mind works. It’s translating and transforming all the time. Not in words, but between emotion, character, sound, and image. Otherwise, I probably would have become a writer."
The enigmatic painter arrives in Los Angeles at an interesting time, a world turned upside down, logic beginning to lose meaning. And there are these minimal, surrealistic visions of the body, of language, of expressions, that seem to come from an ether of another universe. "I like clear, articulated ideas that are easy to distinguish from one another. The more fundamental and simpler, the more enthusiastic I get about it," he says. And in complicated times, even Arjen takes something clear and makes it Incomprehensible. —Evan Pricco
