A wide selection of works by Koen Vermeule (Goes, 1965) will be on display at Museum JAN in the spring of 2025. Paintings and gouaches—many of which have never been exhibited before—that reflect his world, his perception, his view of the environment and the people in it. The images originate in everyday life. The cityscapes are often sharp observations of our own time and contemporary human behavior, while his landscapes are characterized by silence and timelessness. However, there is nothing ordinary about the works: they carry something universal and lasting, and often something elusive. "Ultimately, I want to say something about themes such as love, desire, life, death, contemplation, the passing of time. Music and the art of others, which I carry with me, also play a role in this," says Vermeule.
A special feature of this presentation is the combination with song lyrics. Lyrics that the artist has carried with him throughout his life, words or fragments of sentences that, together with his work, set the mood in the rooms of Museum JAN. From realism to poetry: Vermeule's motifs vary from his family members and street scenes to fleeting landscapes, which he photographs and uses as the basis for his work. Stylistically, Vermeule combines romanticism with realism, abstraction with poetry. His work also reflects his enthusiasm for the history of painting, music, and literature. Beloved artists who always travel with him are Oskar Schlemmer, Georges Seurat, and Léon Spilliaert. "That also influences my work, just like those song lyrics and the images from my surroundings."
Using his photographs, sources from art history, preliminary studies, and poses from the judo he practices, Vermeule sets to work in his studio. "I am a builder." He removes the noise from the images, sometimes tilts the perspective, chooses the characters, and sometimes lets one color dominate. His paintings are ultimately clear and stripped of distracting details, but they find their origin in a layer of collected images, ideas, and personal associations.
Posture
The characters that populate Vermeule's works are often urban loners in contemporary clothing who hang around, sit, lie down, or walk. They are busy with their phones, cameras, or listening to music, temporarily disconnected from their surroundings. They are people you encounter every day, the anonymous city dwellers. Vermeule is primarily interested in their posture, not their facial expressions, he says. 'Judo has shaped me; its spirituality and aesthetics also determine my posture, my gaze.' Both judo and painting require the same kind of concentration, years of practice, and dedication to movement.
Music
Although the works radiate peace and tranquility, music plays a role in the creative process. Vermeule listens to music in all its facets, always searching for the unknown, from classical to rocksteady ska. For Poetry Suite, he selected excerpts from some twenty songs—by Gabriels, Little Simz, Talking Heads, and Lee Scratch Perry—to transport the viewer into a theatrical atmosphere. Like a frieze, the texts and the artworks form a continuous whole and set the mood in the spacious and light museum rooms in Amstelveen. Vermeule takes you into his familiar yet unsettling world, which encourages reflection.