The Tower features new paintings by Arthur Stokvis. Neon colours fill the picture with broad strokes of paint. Stray symbols in thin brushstrokes, float among blackened fumes of mist.
These recent works by Stokvis combine motifs that have long played a major role in his painting practice. As a result, a high density emerges, both of painting layers and techniques that form a cohesive image on top of each other, and a renewed sense of recurring symbolic templates, which meet in the spaces between.
Shaded details and screaming punk letters do not tell stories, but form new images. They can be toxic or flat, haughty and elitist, admirable or commercial. They arouse desire or disgust, nostalgia or wonder. An eclectic collection of images, with the common denominator that they are effective, doing it.
From oak leaves and scorpions, to carnival emblems and rural graffiti, meanders, hammers and sickles, lotus flowers and ghosts. Innocent at first glance, these signs seem to represent potential catastrophes in the future. Like terrible possibility, floating among the poison clouds of a post apocalyptic fever dream.
Arthur Stokvis, 1981, Groningen, studied at Academy Minerva and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. His work consists of paintings and murals. Arthur Stokvis teaches at the St. Joost Academy in ‘s Hertogenbosch. His work has recently been shown at Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam, Ten Haaf Projects, Amsterdam, Kunstruimte Willem II, ‘s Hertogenbosch and Marres, House for Contemporary Art, Maastricht, among others.
