24 february 2025, Yves Joris
Bas Coenegracht: more than one soul
There are artists who capture the world in fragments as a collection of separate scenes held together only by a coincidental convergence of time and space. And then there are artists who, like cartographers of the uncertain, layer memory and imagination until a reality emerges that is both distorted and startlingly recognisable. To me, Bas Coenegracht belongs in the latter category. His paintings are not merely visual compositions, but carriers of an inner movement, a continuous oscillation between appearance and disappearance, between materiality and dream.
Coenegracht (Maastricht, 1974) currently lives and works in Amsterdam. He has developed into a painter who does not simply depict his figures, but allows them to emerge from the material itself. His canvases are built up from photographic references, memories and a layered painting technique in which he applies acrylic paint with both brush and palette knife — thin and fluid or thick and impasto. His themes fluctuate between migration, introspection and the sublime in an attempt to not only depict human existence, but make it tangible in the very skin of the paint.
In the exhibition 'I Have More Souls Than One' (Uitstalling Art Gallery in MAD Gallery in Poland), Coenegracht explores the multiplicity of the self. His figures oscillate between realism and abstraction, between dream images and documentary remnants. They appear in vividly coloured environments that are as much mental landscapes as physical places. This is neither static art nor fixed anecdote, but a continuous movement — like humanity itself, like memory that never stands still.
Bas Coenegracht, I have more souls than one, 2024, Uitstalling Art Gallery
I have more souls than one
The exhibition takes its name from the poem 'I have more souls than one' by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. But there is also an enormous canvas, measuring two by three metres and bearing the same name. A sheen hangs over the painting, a wet haze that does not evaporate and fills the entire space. As if it is still coming into being, as if once applied, the paint continues to breathe under the light. Bas Coenegracht does not merely paint faces or bodies, but layers of time — layers of resistance, of memory, of something that moves between consciousness and dream. You feel how his images linger just beyond the reach of clear meaning, how they refuse to be unambiguous.
A group of figures stands in the image, partly recognisable, partly dissolved in something that resembles sunlight, but could just as easily be a flame. The colours shimmer like wet pigments on an old fresco, worn by breath and wind. A yellow haze looms, like a smoke screen or veil that can only be broken with difficulty. There they stand, huddled together, their bodies partly formed, partly erased, in the struggle between appearance and disappearance.
Bas Coenegracht, Beholder_02, 2024, Uitstalling Art Gallery
A landscape of shadows
Some figures pull at a cloth — a net, a remnant of something that may once have provided protection, but now seems a twisted burden. It is yellow, almost golden, but not the colour of triumph — rather the colour of something left too long in the sun, something scorched, something touched by time.
These figures, these souls, stand in a landscape that resists definition. Sometimes it resembles a beach, sometimes a plain, sometimes just a place where air and dust meet. One figure seems to flow into another. They are wanderers, migrants, survivors. They look at us without looking at us, their eyes sunk into an empty reality that borders our own, but never fully merges with it.
Coenegracht starts with a photographic document, but the certainty of that document is lost through repetition and repainting. The canvas becomes a place where time clots together, where people remain still while the paint flows around them.
Bas Coenegracht, Beholder_01, 2024, Uitstalling Art Gallery
The language of colour
There is something about the colours. You would expect them to provide comfort, that the bright blue and burning yellow would break the melancholy, but the opposite is true. The colours seem to burn from beneath the surface, as they are not applied to fill the canvas, but to let something speak from underneath. This is not a palette of harmony, but a chromatic protest: colour that refuses to settle, colour that moves within the eye, something that cannot be ignored.
In this storm of colours, humanity is distorted. Sometimes a face briefly emerges from the paint, only to dissolve again into the painterly turbulence surrounding it. The edges of the figures are never sharp, never definitive. There is always a transition, a vagueness that keeps them in motion. Their skin consists of multiple layers of pigment, their postures suggest action, but also the moment just after the action — the moment when something has happened, its echo still reverberating.
The figures carry a certain burden, a weariness that is not merely physical. They are thinkers, wanderers, people who come from somewhere and go somewhere else, but the in-between seems endless. They exist in a constant transition: between movement and stillness, between materiality and dissolution, between resistance and surrender.
Bas Coenegracht, Sight Unseen, 2024, Uitstalling Art Gallery
The multiplicity of the self
To me, the title of this exhibition, 'I Have More Souls Than One', is an ode to Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. “I am someone today, and someone else tomorrow” wrote Pessoa, who divided himself into multiple writerly personas. Perhaps that is what is happening here, too — a form of painting in which the human being becomes multiple, in which the individual no longer manifests as a closed unit, but as a being that keeps shifting.
Perhaps that is what makes these paintings so elusive: they are snapshots of a process, but never an endpoint. There is a continuous tension between appearance and dissolution, between what is remembered and what threatens to be forgotten.
And so you look at these works as you look at a memory. You think you know the image, that you understand it, but each time you look again, something shifts. The colours break free from their contours, a figure suddenly emerges from the background, a face surfaces and disappears again into the chaos of the brushstroke.
