With his focus on ecology and nature, artist Herman de Vries (1931) has again become up -to -date

The Witbebaarde artist makes, naked and the arms raised in the air, a joy in the forest that he calls his studio. The Steichenwald, 200 square kilometers in size, is located near the Bavarian Eschenau where Herman de Vries has been living since 1971. It is the cosmos in which he moves every day. For De Vries (Alkmaar, 1931, he writes his name without capital letters) there is no distinction between nature, art and life. Moreover, nature itself is art, according to De Vries.

Sometimes it happens that an oeuvre becomes up -to -date at the end of a long and working life. That is the case with De Vries. The broad recognition that he now likes is partly due to the art historian Cees de Boer, who (together with exhibition maker Colin Huizinga) presented the work of De Vries in 2015 at the Venice Biennale. De Boer has now made a retrospective in the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in which the focus is on De Vries as an artist/researcher who has been involved in nature and ecology since the 1950s. Visual arts, research, language and philosophy have been melted here into an indivisible whole. The exhibition, according to the museum, the largest of De Vries’ work so far, brings all the periods of his artistry together in an overview.

In the early 1960s, De Vries became known in the wake of the zero movement. He wanted to join the Nulgroep (1960-65), consisting of Armando, Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven, but Armando put a stop to that. The zero movement wanted, in the words of Schoonhoven, « found reality as art » and was averse to symbolism, of senses expression and of a personal handwriting. The group aimed for an impersonal type of art that came directly from everyday life, made with non-artistic materials such as plastic, polystyrene and found objects and with a preference for abstract grid patterns.

The early work of De Vries has all these characteristics. The exhibition in the Rijksmuseum Twenthe makes clear how De Vries was also guided by other motives from the start than by cool abstraction and the connection with the everyday. In 1957 he noted in a notebook: « Art is visualizing nature. » His lifelong deeply felt connectedness with nature and ecology means that his work now appeals in a renewed way and that the work from the sixties and seventies is now in a different light.

Moth

De Vries became in the early 1950s, after obtaining a diploma at the middle horticultural school, research assistant at the Plant Diseases Service (PD) in Wageningen, later the Institute for Applied Biological Research in Nature (ITbon) in Arnhem. At the same time he started drawing and painting. At the ITbon it was his job to map the influence of environmental factors on the development of the population of the pine tensioner, a moth. In the Hoge Veluwe he collected caterpillars, dolls and their food and set up an insectarium at the ITbon building. He followed the method of the ‘jamot ecology’: caterpillars were stopped in jam jars with twigs and food, 720 pots in total, set up in a grid pattern of 12 by 60 pots. He did samples into the well -being of the caterpillars according to the table with random numbers of Fisher/Yates and noted the test measurements with a self -conceived system of color codes in felt -tip pen.

This scientific method, with coincidence systems, color coding and grid patterns, would determine the art of De Vries. The white relief V67-36C Coincidence objectification (1967), a wooden panel of 640 cm long and 45 centimeters high on which wooden beams are attached in changing patterns, made for the entrance hall of the Itbon, is superficially viewed a typical geometric-abstract work from the sixties. But the composition is inspired by the way in which pine trees on the sandy soils position themselves spatially in relation to each other. Every cluster of wooden bars represents a pine tree.

Everything flows

Nature soon changed to the source of inspiration (such as with the ITbon relief) in work model. In 1975, in collaboration with his partner Susanne de Vries he was created with whom he has been working since, 16 DM2. For that work, De Vries delimited a square shape the size of a sidewalk tile in a turf. All plants that he found there at 16 square decimeter, 473 in total, he stuck on sheets of paper and each listed them separately.

Everything is moving in nature. The whole world flows and we flow along, says De Vries. This current is the ‘bedding’ of the total reality that is on the move itself. There is only coincidence and change. There is therefore no hierarchy, reason why De Vries does not use capital letters.

This created a large number of coincidence, randomly lenses or Random Objectivations called, who always have the coincidence of Fisher/Yates as the starting point. This can be patterns of colored plains or dots or whatever, and also texts. The result is a form of concrete poetry, in which De Vries destroys and scatters texts over an empty page, so that the empty space around the language will penetrate into the language.

In the end, in the final phase of the work, nature is no longer a model for art, but nature is art. There is nothing left to show nature as art. The triptych Rasenstück (2015) Shows pressed plants and grasses rear glass on paper. Les Terres du Pays de Cézanne (2009) is a series of 42 ‘Earth exhibitions’ on paper, all different in color. De Vries rubs a portion of earth on paper, so that the work is only one pass from reality.

In the archive of De Vries there are many hundreds of samples of earth from all over the world. They are all different, just as every tree leaf is different. Repetitions do not exist in nature, there are only individual events that follow the flow of chance and change. The artist now only needs to show: This this this … Or, as in a text work that is completely covered with the handwritten word all.

Because he himself is part of nature, artist now also appears in his work, as in the aforementioned photo work. As he closed: « The World is My Chance / It Changes Me Everyday / My Chance Is My Poetry« .

To share

Mail the editors