Simon Schrikker
They’re dogs, there’s no doubt about that.
Yet the paintings are not actually about dogs. Too much happens in the process of becoming.The dogs start out their pictorial life on the world wide web, where the painter meets them. Playing with a baby or fetching a tennis ball, all caught on camera by a loving owner, but the painter focusses, squints his eyes and sees mastiffs, bulldogs, rottweilers ready to flaunt their power. Bred and born to intimidate.
The painter knows enough and starts his work.
In the process the painter loses the dog. He becomes ‘image’, turned to paint. And in return the image gets lost too through scraping, spraying and being covered in thick pastes of paint. There is a struggle with the depicted, a struggle like a dog on dog struggle, a fight of some kind.
From this matter the dog arises, but only now exactly as the painter would want him to.
The life of the painter starts out with a terrifying image. Call it primal fear. The adult painter sees through the act of innocence and the hidden display of power. If ever he was a painter of animals, then he would be the most sinister.
Angst became dog, became paint, became eagle, mess, text.
In return everything has to be decoded in the eyes of the beholder, a place where everyone’s pet dog keeps guard.
Olphaert den Otter 2011
