House II 2015

Jarik Jongman painted "House II" using oils on canvas in a 60 x 80 cm format. I can feel the weight of the paint in this landscape painting. The brushstrokes are dark and earthy, pulling the viewer's eye up towards the stark white building. The house looks so brittle, like a paper model in a dollhouse. Its rigid geometry contrasts with the chaos of the landscape. I imagine Jongman was thinking about the relationship between humans and nature, and how we try to impose our will on the world. Look at the emerald sky, and how the paint looks slick. Maybe he thought that the sky looked like black water, and this gave him the feeling that the house would fall into the ravine. Painters are always responding to each other. With this house, I get a slightly unnerving feeling, like in a Gerhard Richter painting. But Jongman makes it his own. Each brushstroke is a conversation, a question, a possibility.