Àngels Miralda – författare

The first comprehensive study on the work of visionary painter William MonkWilliam Monk is a British-born, New York-based artist known for his enigmatic and vibrant paintings that often investigate the same motif or theme in different permutations. Deeply interested in the idea of creating images that are not a direct transcript of the real world but a product of his mind, Monk creates starkly divisional compositions carrying irregular intensities of detail, line, foreground, and background, pushing his work and the foundational elements of painting to the point where model and subject become two separate entities.

Pieter Slagboom’s drawings are about life and death. About how these ostensible antagonists are inseparable; how, in his imagination, they are even fused. In his enormous canvases, we are held by the essence of our existence as though by a steel vise: we come from the void and in the end shall return to it. Thousands upon thousands of sweeping lines, twisting like Moebius strips, make for an almost physical experience of this truth. The dead and the newborn emerge from the primeval soup of Slagboom’s lines, as do genitals; we spot larger-than-life fantasies of disturbing sexual acts. The circle of life as a short circuit. The energy of some of the pictures in Slagboom’s oeuvre is almost too much to bear - we shudder before the pigments materializing our latent knowledge: that death is suspended in life.