21 october 2021, Flor Linckens
Pat Andrea: “Artists are here to paint a world we cannot see”
You can currently see two solo exhibitions with work by the internationally renowned artist Pat Andrea: at Museum MORE in Gorssel and at Galerie Ramakers, in his hometown of The Hague.
Pat Andrea, La virgen de las mentiras, 2020, Galerie Ramakers.
The Dutch artist was born in 1942 as the son of a painter and an illustrator. Andrea studied at the KABK in The Hague under none other than Co Westerik. During and after his studies, he made several journeys that strongly influenced his work. First to Greece in 1962 and 1964, followed by a trip to Cuba in 1969, Ireland and America in 1974 and Argentina, Bolivia and Peru the following year. He soon found a second home in Argentina. Today, Andrea divides his time between Paris and Buenos Aires.
Andrea: “I came to Buenos Aires the day after the military coup in 1976 [by Jorge Videla] and I stayed and lived this for quite some time: it made me more serious in my art. Two years later, I met my today’s wife in Mendoza and Argentina became my “other-me”. In this mixture of immigrant cultures, with a Mediterranean ancestry, things appeared clearer to me. There is less varnish over our harsh society.”
Pat Andrea, Recto Verso - 2017, 2020, Galerie Ramakers
There are a number of recurring themes in the artist’s figurative paintings. Fear, power, desire, oppression, cruelty, eroticism and that which all can be traced back to: our subconscious.
Andrea: “The unconscious is the key to my subjects. What I paint is in fact what I see when I widely open the doors of my unconsciousness. I’m an observer of human relationships, our social drives and pulsion. Artists are here to paint a world we cannot see, the world of ideas, the world of dreams, the things that do not exist. That’s our task.”
Pat Andrea, Alice, champignon, 2021, Galerie Ramakers
It results in intense paintings that can be traced back to raw, human emotions. At the same time, his portrayals often resemble dreams or visions. His depictions can be grim and disturbing — with weapons, chainsaws and menacing dogs — but they are equally characterised by humour and riddles. Sometimes, his gallery openings are accompanied by playful actions, such as a boxing match during his very first solo exhibition in 1966. His paintings are loaded with personal meaning, but just as much with social relevance. Andrea works in a classic way, with preliminary studies and underpaintings over which he applies a multitude of thin, transparent layers of paint. Sometimes he deviates from this, which is when you see opaque layers of paint or a preliminary study that is still visible.
Andrea's work has been included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Maeght, the MoMA, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, the ABN AMRO art collection and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Between 1998 and 2007, Andrea taught at the renowned École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and in 2002 he was appointed a member of the Academie des Beaux Arts de l'Institut de la France.
An exhibition with a series of recent works can be viewed at Galerie Ramakers in The Hague until 7 November. The exhibition in Museum MORE will be on show until 23 January 2022. Funny detail: the exhibition in Museum MORE opened on October 10, but visitors were able to spot the artist in action for several days from October 3, as he made a monumental wall work in honour of the exhibition.
