About her painting
Her painting
Hester Van Wijngaarden's painting
par Guy Rigo
Bulls, elephants, horses are among the largest land mammals. They symbolize the forces of the earth. They are animals that blow, whose trunk and nostrils exhale telluric power. They are primitive and noble. Symbolically charged within the collective unconscious they have inspired the founding myths of humanity, and still participate in the history of man.
Black and white, the main colours of the works are also primitive. They are the opposing forces of all things from which form and matter are born; the hollows and bumps, the rhythms and music. Like the darkness and the light in the first book, black and white are the beginning, a reproductive anchor, the gesture of creation. A constant reminder of the origins and primordial energy that animate them.
Hester van Wijngaarden’s figurative approach towards her subject is concentrated on a resolutely realistic look. This is the bias of a mimetic representation of the world. Between what is, and what is perceived, is the eye, itself painted in an attempt at a non-subjective view of the world. This is the opposite of a process of appropriation, which is deliberately transforming and personal. The real is not allowed to flee. Reality is not a dream or a philosophy. The real is. The eye reminds us of this with a singular insistence.
Do we need the courage, the wisdom and the nobility of these great animals that blow, in order to bring us this perspective and inspire us? Perhaps. These three sacred beasts of human history, under the brush and brushstrokes of Hester van Wijngaarden, became our mentors.
In the light of a tutelary eye begins a reflection on the world and our relationship to it, an idea emerges. Between time elapsing - the old elephant - and time stopping - the sacrificed bull - there is the time of freedom or that of liberation - the horse. He is the corner stone of a new parable. The horse is the only actor in the trilogy that is captured in complex postures, and sometimes released to weightlessness. It expresses in a fiery lyricism the exaltation of living.
The pictorial approach proposed by Hester van Wijngaarden is that of a vibrant and kinaesthetic nature. Through the modelling of the body, the turgidness of the veins, the salience of the muscular masses, the thickness of the cracked skins, she gives a sense of touch, the ability to knead, to palpate. It is a physical world that it evokes, that it invokes, and that it finally provokes in a kind of obstinacy to produce living matter from a flat surface. We remember Paul Eluard's sentence: "The poet inspires more than he is inspired". The painter inspires.
However, if the effort of figuration prevails in the approach of the living, it ends up giving way to the injunctions of the "I" and the subjective projection. The red and blue traces of the paintbrush remind us of this. Moreover, the abstraction of the background whose curves and lines isolate the subject from it’s natural environment and place it in a universe of segmented geometry, waves and magnetic fluxes.
There are no trees, there are no meadows, no skies. This is the vision of the matrix lattice to which the subject leans.
Finally the dichotomy wins.
Between nature and culture, the animal observes us.
Black and white, the main colours of the works are also primitive. They are the opposing forces of all things from which form and matter are born; the hollows and bumps, the rhythms and music. Like the darkness and the light in the first book, black and white are the beginning, a reproductive anchor, the gesture of creation. A constant reminder of the origins and primordial energy that animate them.
Hester van Wijngaarden’s figurative approach towards her subject is concentrated on a resolutely realistic look. This is the bias of a mimetic representation of the world. Between what is, and what is perceived, is the eye, itself painted in an attempt at a non-subjective view of the world. This is the opposite of a process of appropriation, which is deliberately transforming and personal. The real is not allowed to flee. Reality is not a dream or a philosophy. The real is. The eye reminds us of this with a singular insistence.
Do we need the courage, the wisdom and the nobility of these great animals that blow, in order to bring us this perspective and inspire us? Perhaps. These three sacred beasts of human history, under the brush and brushstrokes of Hester van Wijngaarden, became our mentors.
In the light of a tutelary eye begins a reflection on the world and our relationship to it, an idea emerges. Between time elapsing - the old elephant - and time stopping - the sacrificed bull - there is the time of freedom or that of liberation - the horse. He is the corner stone of a new parable. The horse is the only actor in the trilogy that is captured in complex postures, and sometimes released to weightlessness. It expresses in a fiery lyricism the exaltation of living.
The pictorial approach proposed by Hester van Wijngaarden is that of a vibrant and kinaesthetic nature. Through the modelling of the body, the turgidness of the veins, the salience of the muscular masses, the thickness of the cracked skins, she gives a sense of touch, the ability to knead, to palpate. It is a physical world that it evokes, that it invokes, and that it finally provokes in a kind of obstinacy to produce living matter from a flat surface. We remember Paul Eluard's sentence: "The poet inspires more than he is inspired". The painter inspires.
However, if the effort of figuration prevails in the approach of the living, it ends up giving way to the injunctions of the "I" and the subjective projection. The red and blue traces of the paintbrush remind us of this. Moreover, the abstraction of the background whose curves and lines isolate the subject from it’s natural environment and place it in a universe of segmented geometry, waves and magnetic fluxes.
There are no trees, there are no meadows, no skies. This is the vision of the matrix lattice to which the subject leans.
Finally the dichotomy wins.
Between nature and culture, the animal observes us.
by Daniel Lefranc
Hester Van Wijngaarden animal painter?
Certainly Hester paints elephants, bulls and horses but what overwhelms us is another look at the animal race. Hester forces us to see in the greatest conquest of man, the horse, a being who lives, who suffers, who is afraid, who streets, who snorts ...
The central character of her painting, the horse, has a soul and feelings, which she allows us to perceive thanks to the magic of her pictorial expression.
Romantic? Certainly, but in the manner of a Géricault capable of crystallizing in the eyes of the horse the fear of the injured cuirassier leaving the battlefield (1812).
Romantic or rather lyrical?
The animals staged are rarely at rest, Hester likes to evoke life, trapping in snapshots the jolts of animals overflowing with vitality, passion. This passion we find in his pictorial practice; by usually speaking on large formats, the painter's gestures are ample, generous, and in this sense, Hester lets perceive a certain lyricism.
As for romanticism, it should be sought in the lighting of his models ... and in the darkness that envelops them.
If classicism is based on the reuse of ancient works (or brought up to date), romanticism takes pleasure in favoring the imaginary, the lyrical surge, fiery, violent feelings.
Hester's animals evolve outside of any identifiable context, yet "funds" often have the mission of exalting the movement of the animal. They participate in the dynamics of the work. The animals often move in the shade where a theatrical lighting reveals the scattering of a mane or the ancestral folds of the elephants' epidermis. In this sense, Hester's painting is part of a formal, more than conceptual, romanticism. The violence of her figures, the nervousness of the writing, the perfect mastery of light and drawing make her an unclassifiable artist, foreign to all movements, to all schools.
In the act of painting his animal figures, Hester paradoxically tracks down humanity, which emerges and splashes us.
This kindness, this readable compassion in the expression of the animal's gaze returns us to the mastery of his Art, because let there be no mistake, what Hester communicates to us, this illusion of spontaneity masks the intense work that l artist performs on herself.
by Virginie Guignot
A look, a movement, a moment.
Hester van Wijngaarden works in series, there are bulls, horses and then elephants.
The paintings are all giant fragments of life. The frame is fragmented, the animal is most often decontextualized.
Ultra-realism rubs shoulders with the ghostly, purity sublimates academicism. Seek the essence of this brute force that transcends the species barrier: Matter, movement, light, the empathy that a look provokes...
Stop and watch. Maybe try to understand?
The monumental fragility of the elephant, the fury of the bull, the benevolent cooperation of the horse. Each canvas by Hester van Wijngaarden is a hollow portrait of the wild and brutal energy of our nature, and obsessively asks us this question: In the end, the animal or the human, who looks at whom?
Who understands who? Who judges who?