Venetian Red

Johan van Oord is best known for his precise compositions without a trace of emotion. He does not make landscapes or still lifes, but instead creates abstract, almost mathematical paintings. The title of the wall painting for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen's Espresso Bar, ‘Venetian Red’, refers to the colour in which it is painted. Drawing on his ‘pill paintings’ from 1996, this work contains numerous abstract forms such as a sun and a quotation mark. All the forms are charged with a kind of ‘painterly magnetism’: they appear to attract and repel one another. The densely packed forms are placed at a minimal distance of 11 cm from each other. In this way Van Oord creates a kind of abstract space in the white background: an aura between the painted and the unpainted. For each wall, Van Oord has made a particular ‘dance’: a composition with its own peculiar rhythm. He works like a choreographer, constantly rearranging the forms: from sun to exclamation mark, from exclamation mark to sun. One pill from each wall flows onto the next, creating a connection between each ‘dance’.