Because of the large number of self-portraits he makes, the painter Koos de Vries (1993) himself is extremely visible in his own oeuvre. In the diptych he is showing at Prospects, his characteristic thin moustache and shoulder-length hair are immediately recognizable. We first see him lying in a bathtub. “One hung-over morning I felt an unreasonable amount of shame about the previous night, I wanted to hit myself in the head.” The latter actually happens in the second painting: like some kind of Herculean figure, the artist raises a club above the third self-portrait in his diptych. De Vries: “One way of dealing with emotions like shame is to turn them into the subjects of my work.”
When it comes to his own artistic practice, De Vries is also facing his fears. While painting he noticed that he would often think about great names in art history, which sometimes had a paralyzing effect. In addition to working in oils, he therefore decided to pick up the airbrush. According to him, there has not yet been a master of this medium, thus allowing him the freedom to develop a style of his own, and ‘to bluff’, as he calls it. He compares himself to 17th-century painters who wanted to depict a muscular Hercules without having the proper anatomical knowledge to do so. This meant they rather randomly stuck muscles onto the body. “All artists are bluffing when recreating a reality that doesn’t exist. The better the bluff, the better the painting.”
Text: Jorne Vriens
Translation from Dutch to English: Marie Louise Schoondergang