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Section artists of the gallery

Olav Cleofas van Overbeek



THE IMAGINARY MONASTERY OF OLAV CLEOFAS

By F.N. Steyn, translation by Paul van Brakel - This Side Up!, March 1998

The contemporary still life is the product of a long development. If in former times the love of ostentation was predominant, now we see soberness. Where previous a lot of attention was given to both the material aspects of the carefully arranged objects and the complicity of their symbolism, today everything has but a token preference to the emotional, the contemplative and other hardly noticed aspects of life. Material texture can be important, but flows over seamlessly into suggestion and abstraction.

The objects painted by Olav Cleofas van Overbeek have, within the image, become subordinated to the surrounding light; sometimes diffused, sometimes in sharp contrast. What actually is light? That will remain a riddle. It is certain that it changes its character through the objects on which it falls and in a larger measure through the intervention of the artist who beholds it. In the spiritual eye, light appears a second time and will be transformed to something personal by sentiments. There is an interaction between light that has been felt and interpreted and the personal feelings, translated in light tones on canvas. In this way, the artist manipulates reality in a certain sense, whatever that might be. The logic of the classical and traditional range of a still life will be interrupted by the most personal picture.

EMOTIONAL LOGIC
Three things typify the works of Olav Cleofas: a fabulous technical ability to express material texture, an almost un-secular abstraction and a strong affection for light that changes its character within his hands, showing a wide, yet subtle variation.
So superrealism appears to be more abstract then the abstraction itself and the spectator's view slips via light to the emotional logic behind the visible object. In contrast with what people think, the stiffness and the styling of the represented objects emphatically appeal to the combined emotions. Apparently, expression is not necessarily connected with spontaneous or direct pencil manoeuvre.

A QUIET CELL
Once Olav Cleofas intended to enter a monastery. A fact that tells something about the character of his work in which stillness and sensitivity of expression, emphasize the small details an+d the indirectness. The monastery life often accents limitations and rejects superfluity, considered to the obstacles to reach the essential. A proverb says that reducing distinguishes the genius, which also applies here. Nothing in the work of Cleofas is superfluous or ornamental and just that scarceness of material offers all possibilities to light to put forth its richness and to spread its content. Severity and sobriety empty the dais on which the artist can project the fine traced patterns and structures of his emotional life and his association with reality. Its fragility and tenderness will not show to full advantage when it is surrounded by striking and robust objects, whose massiveness engulfs the undertones of emotional life.

HARD AND SOFT
And so there will always be a well-considered modulation for the expressivity of light, as a stimulator, bearer and interpreter of moods. A bowl or a small bottle demonstrates alternately its impenetrable hardness and its nature.
They do not make any concession to their own identity, structure, colour and shape. Further on it appears that they have a reflectional function and transparency. There will be no doubt that their character ultimately will be modified subjectively by the human being who perceives it. People place objects in the world and their character depends on the possibilities of using them. Each of the works of Olav Cleofas is a cell of an imaginary monastery, that offers man and object all possibilities to reach self-awareness.



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