Jos Verwiel

Jos Verwiel (Vught, September 29, 1954) studied from 1973 to 1979 at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tilburg and the Royal Academy of Art and Design in 's-Hertogenbosch. He worked as a teacher at the Tilburg Art Foundation, the Academy of Industrial Design in Eindhoven, the Center for Artistic Education in Veghel, and the University of the Arts in Utrecht. As an artist, Verwiel received various grants from the Dutch Ministry of Culture and Welfare and has exhibited extensively. Within the Dutch painting tradition, Jos Verwiel’s work occupies a truly unique place. It cannot be compared to the work of other contemporary visual artists. Perhaps we can find an explanation for this in his background: he began his career in the arts as a sculptor. He therefore has extensive experience with the complexity of three-dimensional form and with many traditional craft techniques. This is reflected in the composition of his paintings. Despite the limitations of the two-dimensional plane, Verwiel is able to create a complex world within those few millimeters of depth—a world that is not only masterful in terms of color but, above all, in terms of form. This remarkable painter has spent the last 15 years working in Greece on the coast of the Aegean Sea, where he created a large collection of paintings that have found their way into galleries not only in the Netherlands but also elsewhere in Europe and America. Verwiel is currently working in a large studio space on the Dutch coast just south of Rotterdam. Naturally, that Mediterranean influence remains evident in his latest work, which is now becoming larger in both scale and gesture. He observes the same brilliance and clarity here on the North Sea as that bold light in Greece. This light is certainly the key factor in his work, in which he continually experiments with color contrast and the layering of colors. In Verwiel’s monumental canvases, many images lie hidden within the transparent layers of paint, and like an archaeologist, this painter excavates and buries found materials. The collage technique provides a platform for this constructivist, who approaches his paintings as objects—as modern icons in which gravity proves to be the determining factor in the composition. Like a large piece of furniture or a constructed stack adorned with architectural ornaments, the composition stretches across the substantial canvases. Traces of advertising and fragments of a commercial, glossy environment—or of technical drawings and old documents—glow beneath crystal-clear, almost fluorescent swaths of color. You can recognize pieces of canvas and patterns from antique wallpaper or prints from old stencils. His explorations of the markets in Athens, Istanbul, and New Delhi have provided him with this vast visual archive. Sometimes these original works give rise to small series of prints with the same intensity and, at times, even the same capricious surface texture. In India, he regularly collaborates with artisans from a rich tradition to create these masterpieces on handmade paper. These kinds of excursions certainly inspire him when he returns to the seclusion of his own Dutch studio to work on commissions from his agent, galleries, and collectors who are keen to follow Verwiel’s artistic developments.