Paintings

Robert Vellekoop's paintings manage the balance between abstraction and figurativeness with a remarkable ease. Without having to choose a side, he creates images that approach pictograms by forming monotone still lifes and landscapes of a radical reduction. A repetitive motif can be found in the luminous lanterns, as a icing on the cake they are lining the the roads and their light seems to defend against the chilling cold environment. The scenerys, which are characterized by a monochrome background, have an almost dystopian character and thus manage, despite their enormous abstraction, to evoke a strong emotion in the viewer.Unusual is also the substrate on which Vellekoop's work is created. He works with blockboards on which he applies several layers of acrylic and varnish, only to remove parts, paint them over, sand and varnish them. The structure of the wood that serves as a background for the picture leads to an unpredictability and randomness that seems to stand in contrast to the systematic composition of the picture. However, just this connection creates a surreal moment that could not be further from a pictogram.

(Nele Müller)

Tracing a perfect curve, the highway circles around two streetlights, only to be cut - severed? underminded? thwarted? - by a second lane that shatters its immaculate symmetry. In Interchange (2014), how streets and streetlamps operate in the landscape is unclear; foreground and background are organizational entities that appear to abide by now known laws in this work. Robert Vellekoop works on blockboards, he covers with several layers of acrylic paint and lacquer only to abrade and overpaint them, sanding them off before applying another glaze. As a consequence, tiny technical imprecisions in conjunction with random flaws of the material disrupt the accuracy of his - sometimes very neatly subdivided - surfaces.
Vellekoop's painting traces the fine line between abstraction and representation without deciding in favor of either side. Television sets, lamps, plantsm and streets are distinctly recognizable in characterless landscapes, but the radically reductive quality of their iconic depiction makes them look more like pictograms. Now and then - as in Interchange (2013) or Streets (2014) - naturalistically painted circles of light break up the geometric rigor.
However straightforward and meticulously organized the works may seem at first glance, then, failure is immanent to them, even if it is apparent in no more than minor and subtle interferences - a darkish spot in the texture of the wood, unintendedflaking of the paint layer, a translucent area. The translation of obsolete technologiessuch as old TV sets or computers and transportation infrastructure into a modernist-geometrical formal vocabulary moreover evokes associations of modernist utopian visions that foundered.

(Christiane Opitz)