It seems today there is a common belief, almost to the level of a truism, that it is redundant to make art of reality, or “things as they are.” The attitude is that the artist, if drawing from the world, must improve upon nature, make order out of it, find hidden truths, or conversely, they must strip away any excess to uncover the essence or abstract beauty of a place. Then the artist is admired for their interpretation of reality. But if you were to consider the breadth, and also constraints, of your experience in a particular place, including what is unique to your body, what do you see? How would you put that experience down on canvas? How would color as life force translate into color as material? How would you convey a moving object, a sound, or a half-formed thought in that moment? Whatever the outcome, redundancy never enters the picture. A descendant of Cézanne’s “objectivity without sacrificing subjectivity, the landscape thinks itself in me,” Dylan Vandenhoeck is an objective, realist painter whose work includes the full bodily context of an encounter with the world. In that sense, any perceived ‘artistic interpretation’ could be considered a byproduct of his desire to reach towards the real, a material friction, and most importantly a result of reality being an open-ended encounter with an ever-changing world, rather than a fixed image to be interpreted.
New York City, NY; NYC