Raymond Lemstra and Hans Roos – Curves and Corners
Raymond Lemstra
After years of living in Seoul, Raymond Lemstra returned to his native city of Groningen for a year. ‘The playing field of my youth. Many people had quit the scene in the meantime, but going home gave me the opportunity to look up my former teacher, Hans Roos.’ When Raymond was at the Minerva Academy Hans had taught illustration, but meanwhile they both had taken up painting. As it turned out, they shared a great interest: the geometric form.
Symmetry is the backbone of Raymond’s work, in which two circles – on either side of the dividing line between two halves of a mirrored image – always return. This basic form keeps his work from being completely abstract, as it inevitably is interpreted as a pair of eyes. ‘That form is so embedded in our visual lexicon as the sign for an eye that we immediately recognize it as such, whether that was the original intention or not.’ Despite this phenomenon of pareidolia (the imagined perception of human features), which makes us see his images as mask-like ‘portraits’ with an individual character and expression, he eschews all narrative. The placement of one form determines the next, in an associative sequence of actions.
Whereas he had previously built up texture using posters and stickers found on the streets of Seoul as the irregular foundation for his paintings, Raymond’s search is currently concentrated on the materiality of paint itself. ‘I have begun to delve into what paint is and can be. This is how I discovered the properties of various pigments, and how acrylics can sometimes almost seem like oil paints. After years of being away, I developed my own paints at the Minerva Academy’s paint lab.’ The collage-like surface of his earlier works has given way for a spatiality found in the paint, in which the brushstroke now plays an important role.
Hans Roos
As a graphic designer and illustrator, Hans Roos was bound to the rectangular frame of his screen for many years. In his paintings, he decided to abandon that form and go back to the basics of how we see: through our eyes. Since then he has painted within a rounded frame, a move that turned out to be drastic: 'I had to learn to paint again. A circle tends to start rolling, you can’t easily bring the image to a standstill.' Rather than opting for a central composition, which the circle logically invites, Hans uses asymmetry to control the complexity of the composition.
In order to be able to completely get away from the laws of the rectangular frame, Hans started an in-depth investigation into form. ‘No corners, no hotspots, no golden section. There’s a different experience of gravity, of above and below. What’s more, the circle seems to point mainly towards itself and its own centre, due to the lack of a relation with the straight lines that are to be found in its surroundings.' For this reason, he also explicitly scrutinized the boundaries of the painted surface. Ornamental details used on frames, which traditionally are a buffer between the interior and exterior space, recur in his paintings as the main motif. However, corners are not completely absent within the round surface. Sometimes the straight line is barely noticeable, while at other times a sharp corner jabs at the edge of a painting – almost painfully - putting our gaze on alert.