KOEN DELAERE WHITE NOISE RAINBOW

The big moment came when it was decided to paint…Just to Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from value – political, aesthetic, moral.

Harold Rosenberg

Rosenberg’s view of the act of painting as an act of liberation, albeit one brimming with existentialist and psychological implications, feels like a position that Delaere might be happily resuscitating. Rosenberg’s rival, Clement Greenberg, advocated a fundamentalism that didn’t leave much room for meaning and content and forceful painting like Delaere’s (and ironically Pollock’s for that matter), would never concede to such formalist puritanism.

I very much view Delaere’s painting as being aligned to his engagement with life – with music in particular, though the painting is not limited in it’s wider metaphorical reach. The deliberate way that he builds a densely layered field as a kind of geological stratum –  one that he then reveals in a series of volatile tectonic actions gives these paintings a character that rests on a flamboyant resolution of duality. The polarities of north/south, push/pull, thick/thin, ascension/fall all cohere around the painting’s central vertical axis and yet these works are made flat to the floor where gravity itself is less dictatorial.

This will be the second solo exhibition of Koen Delaere’s paintings at Fox Jensen McCrory and we are delighted to say that he will once again be present.

Thrillingly his work will also be seen in the new Sydney space (soon) as part of the opening exhibition, Plastic Soul… stay tuned.