To Irene Brok (1990), the intangibility of being human is an important source of inspiration. The point of departure for her work might be an awkward encounter, a situation that is difficult to read or a bizarre dream resulting from it. In her work she translates moments of disorientation into colourful paintings and installations, while playfully allowing their significance to take on a variety of forms.
Brok sometimes realizes this through an inventive play of light and shadow, and by literally turning her paintings into blue prints, as if they were residues of long gone shapes and situations. For the installation included in Prospects, Rapid Eye Movement #2 (2023), she has put her paintings in two- and three-dimensional frames to allow the visitors to move both inside of and around the installation, giving them a sense of actually entering a dream landscape. With the help of sight lines through the installation and the semi-transparent backgrounds she paints on, Brok creates multiple perspectives, while the various layers of paint on both sides of the material also produce different effects. All this results in a dynamic process where shapes are constantly affecting each other; a constellation of muted colours and surfaces, directions and abstract shapes from which — much like a dream after waking up — the figurate narrative has slowly but surely evaporated.
Text: Esther Darley
Translation from Dutch to English: Marie Louise Schoondergang