Saturday, October 23, 2021 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m
from the opening speech:
Nicole and I met Bastiaan during the Bcademie, where we guided ten artists as tutors for a year in their artistry, both substantively and practically. We were both immediately captivated by Bastiaan's work, the stories as well as the signature. Now, four years later, we are very proud that he has put together his first solo exhibition here in Nieuw Charlois with work from the past four years. These are almost apocalyptic scenes, which we also know from the work of Jeronimus Bosch (15th century) and which I suddenly relive in Bastiaan's drawings.
Even mythical references are present and are included in a multitude of stories, whether or not they actually happened, which are continuously told with each subsequent stroke of the pen. A drawing does not stop, elsewhere it simply starts again.
How exactly can you try to show what's in your head? Surgical I would say. And that brings me to the other part of his work: tattooing with the needle on the skin. The act, the tattooing, carries a certain risk: if the drawing fails you cannot simply be freed from it. However, Bastiaan builds in a backup trick. These images also have something monstrous, unreal and are all provided with a lot of humor, so what could actually go wrong?
Ivo van den Baar
Nieuw Charlois is a gallery/shop and a webshop, where work is shown and sold by Rotterdam artists and designers who live and/or work in the Rotterdam neighborhood of Oud Charlois.
