Thierry Grootaers
Light, air and freedom
About Thierry Grootaers’ work
Thierry Grootaers (b. 1974) makes paintings that secretly speak of oppressive years spent in a dark house, dreaming of liberating, modernist architecture, light, air and freedom. The images we see are deceptive. They remind us of architecture and interior design because they remind us of model homes. Yet such detailed models have never existed, except for dolls’ houses. So what’s going on here? Illustrated magazine pictures seem to come to life again, with a false spatiality made possible by paint. If we look at the same phenomenon from the point of view of painting, we see images that enable a new pictorial spatiality, a playground for zones of color that seem to unfold at different depths.
Most of the paintings were created in three movements. First, a background is created with fields of color applied with acrylic paint and a spalter brush. Then a figurative representation is added, called a “scénette” by Grootaers. Then the painter waits and watches. A wall in the studio is hung like a 19th-century drawing room, with many paintings in progress, slowly revealing how they are to be completed. Sometimes the scene is (partially) repainted, sometimes it is erased or sanded. Often the painting is completed with new monochrome color planes that seem to stand in the foreground of the picture. Scenettes are modeled, backgrounds and final additions are flat.
Now that we know how they’re built, let’s return to these strange flat structures, which seem to be shelters for the unspoken. The characters seem to be involved in frozen, timeless adventures. The roofless doghouses are drawn with false perspective and without shadows, so that the front and back walls remain the same size, like two geometrically constructed surfaces that only acquire a reality value in the painting (not as a representation, but as a plane of color). The cars and houses seem to speak of a sense of security or comfort that is at once felt as suffocating, a suffocation perhaps transcended only by the act of painting. For above all, all the components of these paintings, whether purely planes of color or representations, appear above all as puzzle pieces in complex, new pictorial spaces that can only exist in a painting.
Hans Theys
Honey Mountain, August 19, 2021