Marcel Reijerman (1958)

Marcel Reijerman persuades the eye to wander through the unreal but yet familiar world of his paintings and drawings. A world made up of commonplace visual element, each put down in its own colour and put down with a particular stroke.

These colourful elements stand side by side, without prevailing over one another, without hierarchy. Each spot, every element has its own identity, and has the same weight.

His first “eyeball paintings” were inspired by the delusive, luminous underwater world of the sea aquarium, with its abundant and colourful patterns and movements, and the near-absence of shadows. Reijerman applied the pictorial language of the aquarium to landscapes executed with the bird eye view of 16th and 17th century painters of navel battles.
Over time, his motorways, railroads, buildings, factories, waters, fields and groves featured more and more human figures: marching soldiers, hikers, sportsmen, and tourists with or without touring car or caravan. Still later some of the small figures grew bigger and took over the course of events, helping the artist in planning and a complex and fantastic, yet everyday world in which the viewer, delightedly eye-wandering, discovers something new, again and again.

In this winter exhibition most attention goes to his drawings of the past decade, especially those shown in the catalogue "Even the vigilant ones miss a lot", which we published on the occasion.

Marcel Reijerman graduated from the Art Academy at Arnhem. His work is represented in many private collections as well as in collections of companies (KPN, Bondsspaarbank, KLM, Delta Lloyd, Randstad), the Dutch government (Province of Gelderland, Zuid Holland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and museums (Centraal Museum Utrecht, Teylers Museum Haarlem).

Publications

• Marcel Reijerman "ook de wakkeren missen veel" (Di 01 Jan 2008)
• Het gebekte vogeltje (Zo 31 Jan 2010)