Kees de Vries

Kees de Vries: 'For years I have been fascinated by salt, the purity, beauty of crystals, but also the mystery of the disappearance and regrowth of salt crystals. The pieces I have made since 2010 were mostly about the silence of the works inviting you to contemplation and introspection.

During the corona period, I couldn't help but create work that expressed both the feeling of hope and loss.

Salt cleanses, spoils and gives taste. In my series of work “Hope,” I played with the aspect of “taste”: salt gives taste to food and eating together gives taste to life.

'Hope....' is a deepening of my earlier work, in which the different aspects from the various series seem to come together. On the one hand, the paintings in which intense, sometimes scenic, sometimes baroque emotions in pure pigments and marble powders seem to come at you from the canvas. And on the other hand, the quiet power that salt exudes. Throughout history, salt has been assigned all sorts of powers, prompted by religions or geomantic traditions. By smelling salt in my consoles with tableware, I evoke the unconscious emotions that people have had over the centuries when seeing and using salt.'

Kees de Vries also is a painter were light is the challenge. Colourful and bright which appeals to the imagination of how things can fit together, or using marble powders and pigments which gives the sensation of a travel deep in the hidden caves of  the earth. A painter with a wide pallet of possibilities.

Kees de Vries (Zwartsluis 1957) also makes objects with salt. Salt is one of the most beautiful materials you can find in the world. Pure white with the brilliance of the sunshine. Reflective, purifying, minimalistic, al kinds of qualities are accredited to salt.  Kees de Vries plays with the material and investigates the possibilities to use salt in his works of art. The result are wall objects as well as growing forms. He makes the salt grow into tables, dishes, glasses.... an amazing procedure with refined results.

Galerie Franzis Engels  Nieuwevaart 200,1018ZN Amsterdam     +31 6 31000323       Open: Thu - Sat 13.00 - 18.00    contact@FranzisEngels.nl

Contemporary art in the Center of Amsterdam