Willem Sanders
“Think of your ears as eyes“
Keith Jarrett, Sun Bear Concerts, Japan 1976
Willem Sanders is a pictor doctus. His paintings are intertwined with philosophy and deeply rooted in a profound knowledge of art history. His work has always unfolded between the two poles of immediate painterly action and theoretical reflection. Willem Sanders knows the history of painting, and he is accustomed to the paradoxes posed for any painter acting within this context. A fundamental incompatibility complicates the intention of creating something new, innovative and typical of its time, yet aspiring to an ideal of permanence and a sense of presence that transcends the boundaries of history and local tradition. The art of Willem Sanders has always been a conscious reflection on this discrepancy, and he has time and again succeeded with paintings emanating an immediate power that reaches wider than mere postmodern comments on the legitimacy of art. It is consequent and probably unavoidable that Sanders should direct his attention to the traditional subject of landscape painting – a genre that, parallel to the more intimate genre of still life, stands at the very beginning of painting as high art. Willem Sanders has studied this tradition thoroughly, he is aware of its beginnings and its various local developments from the late Middle Ages until today, from Van Eyck to Gerhard Richter. Since 2006, results of his analysis have surfaced in four bodies of work that emphasize different aspects of his specific contribution to and extension of the landscape tradition. A group of watercolours from 2006 entitled Ceiling are focused on the sky and on clouds in particular. Two series of small paintings from 2010 and 2011 entitled Defractured Landscapes and Canonical Landscapes form the heart of Sanders’ investigation of the subject, whereas another group of watercolours entitled Altalanghe demonstrate a specific aspect of working on the extension of the landscape tradition, adding a new approach to the subject.

Kay Heymer in “Ideal Real Landscape or Real Ideal Landscape”,  Willem Sanders, Paintings and Watercolours, Peter Foolen Editions 2012.

Willem Sanders (1954) Helmond, Netherlands, lives and works in Monesiglio, Italy
more info : www.willemsanders.com Helmond and Monesiglio, Italy

more info : www.willemsanders.com

herman de vries (1931) grew up in Alkmaar, the city where he was born. His father and his ten years older sister showed him what bear’s garlic is like, and dandelion, arum and rose hip; the Speckled Wood, Large Copper and Adonis Blue butterfly. His feeling of being at one with nature never left him. He began his career not as an artist, but as a biologist and natural scientist. The analytical approach to plants and animals that he was obliged to apply in his profession clashed with how he had experienced the natural kingdom as a child. All the same, the objective gaze of the researcher has remained a characteristic of his work as an artist.
He started to make his first artworks in his time off in 1950. As a biologist he engaged in experiments using random tables. The visual application of these tables led to the creation of artworks that he called ‘random objectivations’: a series of drawings, collages, reliefs and a few three-dimensional objects whose  constituent elements were determined by programmed chance. They were the result of his intention to avoid the personal, the subjective, as much as possible. It was the time of the Nul movement in the Netherlands (1960-1965), to which herman de vries belonged for a brief spell, and of the international avantgarde group ZERO. The art of these two movements was characterised by objectivity, seriality and repetition.
Soon afterwards herman de vries decided to leave his job and his home to become an artist. After many wanderings all over the world, he eventually settled down in the village of Eschenau in the German Steigerwald.
In the autumn of 1975 he laid a sheet of paper beneath an apple tree. The paper caught all the falling leaves. He photographed it after one, two and three hours. In the end the leaves were pasted to the sheet of paper. The result was unter dem apfelbaum, the first of many works in which natural features are presented.
At first sight the early, aseptic random objectivations and the later, associative works ‘from nature’ seem to be rather different, but the objectifying aim is remarkably constant. Whether herman de vries applies a line, a circle or a number of leaves to a sheet of paper, each time his personal intervention is confined to demonstrating that things are self-sufficient and that they can be different each time.
The drawing on which the 2017 Langhe Rosso label is based was done in one go with short, rapid crayon strokes – first one red, then the other, and some green, yellow and blue. According to herman de vries, the arbitrary, spontaneous character of the drawing refers to the loss of control associated with drinking wine, but is equally characteristic of the reticence of his intervention, for the almost uncontrolled creation of the drawing is about nothing but colour: the colours of the grape, the leaf, and above all the wine. Which is different every time.

text Lisette Pelsers, director Kröller-Möller Museum, The Netherlands

more info on herman de vries: www.hermandevries.org

David Tremlett at work in the chapel of Relais San Maurizio

2018 edition

THE PAINTED GRAPE

original artwork for The Painted Grape 2018

David Tremlett

lines with irregular ends

pastel on paper

59 x 84 cm

2019

David Tremlett label design for The Painted Grape Edition 2018

The Langhe Rosso D.O.C  is made from two different grapes, Merlot and Barbera D’Alba, hand picked on the hills in Cossano Belbo. When received in the cellar, they are destemmed, crushed and stored in steel tanks. Fermentation takes place at temperatures ranging between 25 and 28°C. The must/wine macerates for a week and then is pressed. When the malolactic fermentation is finished, the wine is put into the oak barriques for 1 year.

bottles are numbered 0/900

Edition: 2018

Langhe Rosso D.O.C.

13,5% Alc. 0,75L

Tremlett’s way
David Tremlett is an indefatigable traveller, but he is neither a captive of distance nor a trader in exotica. He is after something different. On his journeys, rather than recording the physical details of things, he explores space and colour, expanding his repertoire of abstraction. He travels light—in search of light—seeking not so much specific local realities as novel realms of universality. The drawings and sculptures that he creates on his return are shorn of particulars. Colour fields envelop the gaze of the onlooker, like unpopulated areas on a map. Occasionally a fractured ideogram breaks the colour field, or a random sequence of words. Spareness of form, generosity of space, a disciplined palette—these are among the sources of their allure.
There is a physical intimacy to these installations and wall drawings. Tremlett often presses pigments onto paper and plaster directly with his hands. And the colours he uses, at least in the current phase of his work, are the shades of earth (and sometimes sky and sea): eau-de-Nil, charcoal, ochre, terra cotta, ox-blood, aqua, sage. These colours evoke something old: petroglyphs, palaeolithic cave drawings, or Australian aboriginal sand-paintings. They link Tremlett’s creations to images from the deep past, from the dream time, inscribed on rock faces, or the earth itself. They bring to the salon a touch of aboriginality, a reminder of a world without signatures, where art is not part of an investment portfolio.
Palaeolithic art is a source of wonder and comfort for those drawn to human origins, to the beginning of things. The meaning that rock paintings had for their makers may be inaccessible to us, but their existence is reassuring in itself. These ancient, anonymous images make us feel more at home in the world. How is it that they have this effect? Perhaps because they offer us a connection to our earliest ancestors. Perhaps also because the caves where they are located were homes to those who made them.
Likewise with Tremlett’s decorated spaces. He gathers shapes and colours and patterns from the outside world and deploys them inside, on walls and floors and ceilings. His installations are subtly at odds with the architecture they inhabit. They are framed by the rooms they occupy, but they subvert plumb-lines and rectilinearity, revealing hidden curves and planes, hinting at an internal landscape. In these wild withdrawing rooms, eschewing locality, Tremlett creates a time and space of his own, one that feels closer to our beginnings—as close as we can get without leaving home.
Before writing
In 1895, August Strindberg, the playwright and painter, invited by Paul Gauguin to write the preface to a catalogue of an exhibition of his paintings, described, in a letter, his visit to Gauguin’s studio.
“A confused mass of pictures,” he wrote, “flooded with sunshine, which pursued me last night in my dreams”.
He has difficulty understanding Gauguin’s art, he says. He finds himself incapable of grasping what he is trying to do. Yet even as he writes and analyses his response to the paintings, Strindberg says he begins to have a glimmer; he discovers the part of himself which is Gauguinesque.
Tremlett’s art is likewise hard to put into words, the consequence of a wider tension between writing and painting, or between writers and visual artists.
Writers—prose writers at least—tell stories; they lay out plots and theories and explanations. But visual artists are not hostage to narrative in this way. They have privileged access to the pleasure centres of the brain, where shape and colour circumvent our critical faculties, outpacing language. Before writing was invented, there was no such separation. And cave paintings, with their ragged rows of stick men and teeming zoomorphic figures, predate this great divide. They mark the beginning, not just of visual art but of writing as well. They are half-way to hieroglyphs. Tremlett elides the subsequent historical separation of painting and writing; hence his pre-emptive appropriation of the alphabet and incorporation of letter forms. At the same time his works resist interpretation. They challenge the reduction of their colour world to sentences and paragraphs.
There is a strength in this rigorous avoidance of the particular, this refusal to instruct. Eclectic in execution, universal in aspiration, Tremlett has never been part of an identifiable group or school. (If there is such a thing as world art, analogous to world music, this is a label he might perhaps accept.) Unlike the symbolist of ltaparica, he is attached to no single place. His strength lies in nonspecificity. Taking on the colours of the earth, without ceasing to travel, Tremlett has drawn the landscape in, made himself at home in the world. In these rooms, swathed in his art, we also can begin to feel at home.

text John Ryle

more info www.davidtremlett.com

David Tremlett

chapel of Relais San Maurizio

Località San Maurizio, 39, 12058 Santo Stefano Belbo CN, Italy

Marcel van Eeden

2020 edition

THE PAINTED GRAPE

original artwork for The Painted Grape 2020

Marcel van Eeden

Untitled

color pencil on paper

28 x 38 cm

2022

Marcel van Eeden label design for The Painted Grape Edition 2020

The Langhe Rosso D.O.C  is made from two different grapes, Merlot and Barbera D’Alba, hand picked on the hills in Cossano Belbo. When received in the cellar, they are destemmed, crushed and stored in steel tanks. Fermentation takes place at temperatures ranging between 25 and 28°C. The must/wine macerates for a week and then is pressed. When the malolactic fermentation is finished, the wine is put into the oak barriques for 1 year.

bottles are numbered 0/900

Edition: 2020

Langhe Rosso D.O.C.

14% Alc. 0,75L

The artistic work of Marcel van Eeden (b. 1965, Den Haag, NL) is part of a long-term project.

The focus is on images and text that were created before his year of birth. He makes drawings based on images from newspapers and magazines from before he was born in 1965. In series that can include up to 150 drawings, he combines them into adventure stories about secret agents, art dealers and stunning actresses. 

All drawings are based on images from sources such as travel books, postcards, art books, and magazines such as Life, Der Spiegel and Paris Match. 

By using source images and real objects from the past, the artist questions our perception of fact and fiction, creating a “negative self-portrait” composed of notes from a past that he himself could not have experienced. Marcel van Eeden’s work is an ongoing (and never completed) attempt to create a visual catalog of the world as it existed before 1965, which he considers as a way to “create a world that is against me”-a kind of negative self-portrait.

In his latest series of works he has been focusing on drawing on canvas. Images from the city of Zurich, the city where the artist has been living for the past 15 years, which he found in old magazines, travel books, archives and even personal photo albums, serve as the starting point of ‘when the big wackel hug cam to town he shouted why is this town brown’. For the first time he includes color in his work on canvas, images which he found of advertisements in old magazines as color printing in that time was expensive and was reserved for advertising. From the colors one can tell that they derive from another time: the paper of old magazines has usually faded over time which is reflected in the color spectrum that the artist uses.

Marcel van Eeden was born in 1965 in Den Haag, NL, and studied painting in the Royal Academy of Arts in Den Haag. He lives and works in Zurich, Karlsruhe and Den Haag. His work has been shown at the 4th Berlin Biennale, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, Kunstmuseum St, Gallen, Albertina, Vienna, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, Louisiana Museum, Humlebæck, Magasin 3, Stockholm, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin;Art Center, Minneapolis, US, Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Bundeskunstsammlung Bonn, DE, Sammlung Goetz, DE, Burger Collection, HK. Upcoming exhibitions in 2022 include solo exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe among others. 

(excerpt from Barbara Seiler Galerie).

Marcel van Eeden recently made headlines winning the state prize, the Hans-Thoma-Preis 2023 of the German state of Baden-Württemberg, in Bernau on the Black Forest, for Fine Arts.
State secretary for the Arts Arne Braun lauded; The jury has expanded the concept of country natives and awarded the Hans-Thoma prize to a Dutch artist who works in the best sense of the word across borders for contemporary art and the artistic progeny in Baden-Württemberg. I am very pleased to be able to award our most important prize for fine arts to this exceptional artist with international charisma.”

for more info www.marcelvaneeden.nl

Norbert Fleischmann

The Painted Grape 2021 Edition

photo Tiberio Sorvillo

original artwork for The Painted Grape 2021

Norbert Fleischmann

La Notte

Acryl on wood

20 x 30 cm

2023

Norbert Fleischmann label design for The Painted Grape Edition 2021

The Langhe Rosso D.O.C  is made from two different grapes, Merlot and Barbera D’Alba, hand picked on the hills in Cossano Belbo. When received in the cellar, they are destemmed, crushed and stored in steel tanks. Fermentation takes place at temperatures ranging between 25 and 28°C. The must/wine macerates for a week and then is pressed. When the malolactic fermentation is finished, the wine is put into the oak barriques for 1 year.

bottles are numbered 0/900

Edition: 2021

Langhe Rosso D.O.C.

14% Alc. 0,75L

In his work, Norbert Fleischmann deals with models of representation in painting and the recording of different possibilities of image invention. In his exhibition speech at Galerie Sturm und Schober, Vienna, the art historian Ralf Christofori sums up Fleischmann’s artistic approach as follows: “Norbert Fleischmann’s engagement with painting could be described as encyclopedic in a comprehensive sense. This is because it encompasses a wide variety of styles and genres, motifs, painting methods and media influences, even forms of presentation and representation. But he does not celebrate painting as a hero, but makes  the myth of painting the subject of his artistic work.” And Peter Zawrel remarks in his speech on the exhibition “Correspondences, Orders” in Raabs 2016: “for the painter who presents painting in this way, its development is in a certain way already complete. It begins anew as a kind of ‘semantic painting’, as a painting that is not concerned with what is depicted, but with what it does to us. It is not about a gesture of artistic temperament, but about the near and far, the layers of depth that have not let go of us since Romanticism discovered them.” Günter Baumann writes in a review of the exhibition catalogue “Details. reflect glitter shine”: “At first glance, Fleischmann’s individual works look like the works of different masters. The abstract positions seem to be worlds away from the photo-like motifs, which here and there have the appearance of photographs from the 19th century, when one thought abstractly at best. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that it’s not about the content at all. The theme is the look itself: the view of the view of art.

for more info www.norbertfleischmann.at