Wouter Verhoeven

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Artist

Wouter Verhoeven was born in 1961 in a small village in Brabant, The Netherlands. He started as a painter at the age of 35, but during his studies at the Master of Fine Arts Department in Breda he made a shift towards three dimensional work and video. He works on video and film ever since.

March 2009 he published a book, titled Eternity. The book contains 13 full colour images and a text about the art of perception. The previous book was published at the end of 2006. The emphasis in this book is on six films, made together with Bas van den Hurk, between 2004 and 2006. The publication of both books was sponsored by: Fonds voor Beeldende Kunsten, Vormgeving en Bouwkunst, Amsterdam; Noord-Brabants Fonds voor Beeldende Kunstenaars, Breda; IKA, Gemeente Tilburg.

The sound compositions of ‘Fist’, ‘Love and Gold’, ‘V’, ‘Von Altdorf’ and ‘The Eternal Life’ were partially created by Jaime Oliver (Peru) and Stijn Koek (Netherlands). All images are shot by Wouter Verhoeven.

Contact info(at)wouterverhoeven(dot)com

Films

The Eternal Life

Length
35:00 min
Year of release
2007
Recording info
Recorded in Brabant, Netherlands, 2007
Sound
Optical and composed sound (in collaboration with Stijn Koek and Jaime Oliver)
First presentation
(Will be) presented in SMAK, Gand, Belgium, 2009
Editions
Edition of 3 + 1 a.p.
Stills
Clip
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Von Altdorf

Length
22:00 min
Year of release
2007
Collaboration
Made in collaboration with Bas van den Hurk
Recording info
Recorded in Bavaria, Germany, 2005
Sound
Composed sound (in collaboration with Stijn Koek)
First presentaton
first presented in Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, 2007
Editions
Edition of 3 + 1 a.p.
Stills
Clip
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V

Length
22:30 min
Year of release
2006
Collaboration
Made in collaboration with Bas van den Hurk
Recording info
Recorded in Tokyo, Japan, 2006
Sound
Optical and composed sound (in collaboration with Jaime Oliver)
First presentaton
First presented in Kunsthalle, Bergen, Norway, 2006
Editions
Edition of 3 + 1 a.p.
Stills
Clip
Please visit this site with javascript enabled to view the videos!

Love and Gold

Length
28:20 min
Year of release
2006
Collaboration
Made in collaboration with Bas van den Hurk
Recording info
Recorded in Lima, Peru, 2006
Sound
Optical and composed sound
First presentaton
First presented in Galería Municipal de Arte Pancho Fierro, Lima, Peru, 2006
Editions
Edition of 3 + 1 a.p.
Stills
Clip
Please visit this site with javascript enabled to view the videos!

The Flu

Length
–
Year of release
2006-
Collaboration
Made in collaboration with Bas van den Hurk
Recording info
Recorded in Bergen, Norway, 2006
Sound
Composed sound
First presentaton
–
Editions
Edition of 3 + 1 a.p.
Stills
Clip
Please visit this site with javascript enabled to view the videos!

Mas de Charrou

Length
19:54 min
Year of release
2006
Collaboration
Made in collaboration with Bas van den Hurk
Recording info
Recorded in Lot, France, 2004
Sound
Optical and composed sound
First presentaton
First presented in De Witte Zaal, Gand, Belgium, 2006
Editions
Edition of 3 + 1 a.p.
Stills
Clip
Please visit this site with javascript enabled to view the videos!

The Lowe Society

Length
9:39 min
Year of release
2005
Collaboration
Made in collaboration with Bas van den Hurk
Recording info
Recorded in Bridgeport, Chicago, USA, 2005
Sound
Composed sound
First presentaton
First presented in Diamonds on Archer, Chicago, USA, 2005
Editions
Edition of 3 + 1 a.p.
Stills
Clip
Please visit this site with javascript enabled to view the videos!

Fist

Length
1:00 min
Year of release
2006
Collaboration
Made in collaboration with Bas van den Hurk
Recording info
Recorded in Brabant, Netherlands, 2006
Sound
Composed sound (in collaboration with Stijn Koek)
First presentaton
First presented in Provinciehuis Noord-Brabant, Den Bosch, Netherlands, 2006
Editions
Edition of 3 + 1 a.p.
Clip
Please visit this site with javascript enabled to view the videos!

Presentations since 2002 (a selection)

Painting with time and light

Wouter Verhoeven is a Dutch born artist, working on the edge of painting and film. Although he uses a video camera as his medium, he obviously works in the tradition of painting. He paints with time and light, using composition and framing that is akin to that of classical painting. The films, once described by a critic as ‘moving paintings’, are a reflection on the timeless search for light and liberation of the human soul.

The films have an extremely slow pace, there is hardly any movement within the film frame, the characters and their surroundings are captured as eternally immobile. The films have no real narration; the sequences of images are not submitted to a chronology of facts, but rather to the logic of interior individual experience. Every image keeps its autonomy. All these characteristics together, enhanced by a specific sound composition, create a dense cinematographic atmosphere. Viewed in a meticulous installation the notion of time disappears and a state of Being arises in which the viewer and the image dissolve.

The films made between 2004 and 2006 were strongly marked by a sense of ‘alienation’. This has changed significantly though in his recent work. Lately Wouter Verhoeven approaches the people, landscapes and objects barer. A more direct humanistic image seems to appear.

If we concentrate on the form, we will never reach eternity.

Wouter Verhoeven is an artist from the Low Countries. He was born in Oerle, a small village in the province of North Brabant. He could be considered to be a crossing between a Flemish primitive and a Dutch realist. He is gazing with inner eyes, the eyes of his soul, at the realism outside him. In fact, he believes there is no difference between inner and outer reality. The difference exists only in our perception.

One day he found himself on one of the smaller islands near Hong Kong, making a stroll. During that walk, he was suddenly stopped in his tracks; it was as if someone or something had stopped him. He was struck by the sight of a spit of land with rocks, trees and shrubs, bordered by the sea. Had anything or anyone placed it there, this spit of land, was eternity lying there? The answer was contained in what he saw, it was there.

One day, ten years later, he was sitting on a chair at home, his eyes closed, concentrating. After about fifteen minutes, or maybe more, it was as if someone else was looking through his eyes. He saw things unadorned, as they were, without projections, without judgement. Things were just things, not more, not less. He felt immensely liberated, overcome by sheer joy — albeit very briefly, as he was startled by so much purity and happiness and soon returned to the material world, his eyes opened.

Followers of Tao say: he who wants to know Tao must take to introspection. He must avert his eyes from outer life and its gaudy aspects towards the secret depths of his own consciousness, the fields of unbroken inner light. But then cannot the intensity and beauty of that inner light be also found outside us?

Some people declare that in order to make a work of art you must first connect with your subject. This requires some concentration. Talking about Vincent van Gogh, Karel Appel explains this process as follows:

‘Van Gogh’s cypresses show how he painted trees. He had a very meditative disposition, like every painter should have. He looks at that tree, he becomes that tree, and then he is the tree. Once he is the tree he also stops, having finished the painting. Next he takes the piece of linen home and puts it down and then, so to speak, a miracle has happened, for he has touched the secret of life. And that is the painter’s power, that is the only thing painting is about. Touching the secret of life means touching the light. You have touched the intensity of the motion of life.’

It is no different with a film or video camera. You press a button, but what do you actually see? What do you experience? Will you succeed in merging into what you’ve been facing just seconds ago: that person, that still life, that landscape?

If a true Yogin or saint, so the Indian scholar Ananda K. Coomaraswamy writes, sees something in front of his eyes that is indistinguishable from the inwardly known form, this is evidence not of genius, but of a fully matured self, a perfected visual habit, such that the seer now sees not merely projected sensations, but as he ought to see, virtually without duality, loving all things alike. All art thus tends towards a perfection in which pictorial and formal elements are not merely reconciled, but completely identified. At this distant but ever virtually present point, all necessity for art disappears.

Wouter Verhoeven films children with disabilities, a waitress, a seascape at the African continent, an outcast sleeping in the street, the side of a ditch. He observes in a Flemish, Dutch, Brabant fashion, timeless, and if possible without distinctions. He paints with time and light. After a while, time fades away, and only light remains. For Wouter Verhoeven it is not the image he takes home that counts. His art is not about the slide or the film as object. What matters to him is the experience of finding light through art, inside and outside ourselves.

In the perception of the world, man creates, each day and everywhere, his own reality – also without paint-brush or camera. True art takes place in the eyes and in the soul; it is an exercise in unconditional love.

Eternity is everywhere, every moment.



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All films and presentations on this website, created until 2006, are made in collaboration with Bas van den Hurk.