Until 21 January, BorzoGallery in Amsterdam is presenting a solo exhibition by Jurriaan Molenaar. The works by the Dutch painter are marked by an intense emptiness and mathematical and realistic perfection, yet something doesn't feel quite right.
This is because Molenaar uses several vanishing points in his architectural paintings and sometimes adds improbable angles, curvatures or twists. He plays with mathematical and geometric laws. Other times, the artist adds multiple perspectives (and shadows) to a single image. The resulting paintings have a somewhat disorienting effect. Some works seem abstract at first glance, like his swimming pools.
His works are usually characterised by a sober palette, with the occasional striking colour. The constructed, architectural spaces contain something recognisable, yet most of Molenaar's locations are extremely anonymous, leaving plenty of room for the viewer to make their own interpretation. The painter plays with contrasts such as abstraction and figuration and inside versus outside, as well as notions of privacy and claustrophobia. His oeuvre is marked by a clinical aesthetic, but last year at Art Rotterdam, he also showed works with elements of graffiti, which have a certain frayed edge.
The painting process is extremely labour-intensive because the artist carefully covers parts of the canvas with tape that has been specially produced for him. He then provides the painting with countless layers of paint. Molenaar sometimes works on special trapezoidal canvases.
The metropolis is an important source of inspiration for the artist, as well as photos on real estate websites, the architecture of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, Italian frescoes or the paintings of Edward Hopper. Molenaar has traveled extensively and has spent some time in New York, Russia, Israel and Indonesia.
Molenaar's paintings are often based on photographs that the artist has made himself, of walls and windows, or taken from a small plane. He once embarked on a project to capture the Twin Towers in New York and concluded that it is impossible to view the towers in their entirety from a human perspective. He therefore made hundreds of photos from just as many perspectives, which he wanted to combine into one image. But then 9/11 happened. At the time, Molenaar was on the waiting list for a studio on the top floor of the building and the secretary of the studio, whom Molenaar had befriended, did not survive the attack. The project was not picked up until 19 years later and was featured in a special commemorative exhibition at the New York State Museum in 2021.
The reason for the exhibition at BorzoGallery is the renovation of the artist's studio, forcing him to pay new attention to his older works from the past twenty years, some of which are shown in this exhibition.
Molenaar completed a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and won the Royal Award for Modern Painting. His work has been shown in the Fries Museum, the Bonnefanten, the Dordrechts Museum and several times in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. In 2009, one of his paintings hung in the Dutch parliament for a full year.