The Garden of Hypnos I, 2002, 200 x 160 cm, acrylic on canvas Collection Centre of Visual Arts Rotterdam
Richard Bouwman: The Garden of Hypnos
Richard Bouwman gets his inspiration from world literature, classical mythology, painting itself and photography to give form to his image of the world and of Humankind. The poetic oeuvre by the French poète maudit Arthur Rimbaud gave the impetus to a brilliant series of paintings, drawings and graphic work, which he showed in the period between 1997 and 2001 under the title”La Chasse spirituelle” in the Institut néerlandais in Paris, the Musée Arthur Rimbaud at Charleville-Mézières - the place in the French Ardennes where the poet was born –, the Maison Descartes in Amsterdam, the Alliance Française in Rotterdam and at the Rotterdamse Schouwburg on the occasion of Poetry International; on these occasions a catalogue was published. On large canvases and in works on paper, the painter Richard Bouwman formulates his own individual reply to the power of imagination of the great poet. To both artists, painting and literature are a way to represent human life, to formulate a contemplation on ‘humanitas’, happiness and human failure. In the same period, his colleague, the painter André Dieteren (° 1943, Schinnen) took the poetic universe of Rimbaud as a point of departure for his pictorial discoveries. Richard Bouwman’s engagement with and closeness to Rimbaud were profound, to the extent that, after completing this cycle, he wrote a short, beautiful poetic text in French: “Hypnos”, departing from a phrase by the French poet (Illuminations/Antique). Rimbaud is known not to eschew mythological or mystical images. In his new cycle of works, realised between 2002 and 2003, to be exhibited for the first time at the Gemeentemuseum Maassluis, Bouwman will explore the mythical gardens of Hypnos more thoroughly. Hypnos is the personification of Sleep. He is the son of Night and of Erebos (Darkness) and the twin brother of Thanatos, Death. Hypnos rarely left the stage of a pure abstraction behind. In the Iliad, Homer represents him as living on the isle of Lemnos. As Virgil later wrote in his Aeneis, he would have lived in hell. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid gives a long-winded description of his palace where everything is asleep. According to legend, Hypnos was enamoured with Endymion and bestowed the gift upon him to sleep open-eyed, with a view to admiring his beautiful eyes. Endymion has been immortalised by Tintoretto, by Van Dyck, as well as by Rubens. Hypnos plays a quintessential part in the Iliad, the grand epic by Homer, this most disjointed of images of Humankind, which has also been recorded on paper and on canvas by this other great painter Jan Cox (1919, The Hague, +1980, Antwerp). In the Iliad, the Troyan hero Sarpendon is brought back to his native country of Lycia by Hypnos and by Thanathos, after he was slain by Patroclos. The two brothers are depicted as two winged youths. Hypnos holds some poppies and a small horn in his hand. These iconographic elements: wings, poppies and the horn will resurface in one shape or another in Richard Bouwman’s recent work. On the other hand, wings refer to the concept of flying away, of the flight, to the urge to get higher. All of this winged imagery was quite important in Surrealism between the two World Wars: Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Jean Arp, Joan Miro, René Magritte , Paul Klee and André Masson. No doubt Richard Bouwman has borrowed some of the elements of the ‘écriture automatique’ - automatic writing- from the technical vocabulary of Surrealism: it comes to the fore in the calligraphic interpretation of the image and in the swift combination of verbal and visual elements in his paintings and drawings, but also when he tests the strategies of chance and focuses on vertical elements in most of his paintings. The Greek god Hypnos gave his name to hypnosis, the induction of artificial sleep by means of psychological techniques. Morpheus is one of the thousand children of Hypnos. His name is a reminder of the Greek noun ‘morphè’, shape, form, for the very reason that in people’s sleep, he could transfigure into all sorts of human shapes. He is also a winged creature: very large and quick ones which move without making any sound and allow him to move from one side of the world to the other. He has also been described by the Latin poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses; this wondrous tale of transmogrifications which has been transposed into paintings, drawings and graphic art in such beautiful manner by Jean Bilquin (º1938, Ghent). Morpheus has become quite a famous god. In Dutch, the expression “in the arms of Morpheus” refers to a state of deep sleep. The etymology of morphine - the most important alkaloid of opium, a sedative and a narcotic – is derived from it. In addition to Hypnos and Morpheus, Oneiros is a third mythological figure who is referred to in the cycle by Bouwman. In the Iliad, Oneiros, the Dream, is a demon which has been sent to Agamemnon by Zeus in order to mislead him. Most often, dreams are not personified, they consist of a multitude of demons. As such, Richard Bouwman refers to sleep, hypnosis and dreams via Greek mythology. While painting, he quotes and transforms the splendid range of colours of the water-lilies in the gardens of Giverny which have been eternalised on canvas by Claude Monet at the beginning of the previous century. I have already described his relation to Surrealism. Bouwman also quotes and interprets the unsurpassed photographer Karl Blossfeldt who gives extremely detailed renderings of plants, named after their Latin botanical name of reference: euphorbia and hyoscaymus niger or black henbane. The very name of euphorbia refers to euphoria. On the other hand, henbane is a very poisonous variety within the family of the solanaceae or nightshade family, in popular parlance often referred to as mad henbane, which is referring quite specifically to the hallucinogenic nature of this herb. At first sight, one notices a predominance of floral and vegetal shapes in the new cycle by Richard Bouwman, an imagery which ultimately refers to nature, but one rather quickly realises that one deals with mental landscapes which refer to dreams, sleep, intoxication, the enigmatic, the intoxicating forces of nature… One is never confronted with an absolute autonomy of form and of colour in his new works, for they are heavy with traces of organic forms. Man as a being which remains within the reign of nature, an eternal challenge to everything cultural and spiritual. I proceed to my conclusion. According to me, it is difficult to catalogue Richard Bouwman within the constraints of a specific style. His recent work is of far too great a complexity to do so. However, in his most recent realisations, there are some elements which steer our interpretation. First and foremost, there is the well-considered merging of figuration and abstraction. Besides, to artists of his generation, the conflict between abstract and figurative has become a non-issue. Furthermore, his technical mastery is clearly discernable, yet does not take over. Additionally, there is also the refreshing interplay of improvisation and painting freely, on the one hand, and erudition, nourished by his inspiration from mythology, on the other hand. In keeping with myth and the epos, fundamental questions are being raised with regard to human existence. The intensity of colour is also surprising, the use of intense colours, at times transparent, from green to blue and purple to brown. He obtains this effect by painting with acrylic on canvas or with gouache, crayon and ink on paper, some drawings are executed on beautiful Indian paper. Also on a formal level, a free technique is used to work in the direction of ambiguity. Consequently, his work is not a closed, self-contained whole, it can evolve in other directions: the contemporary concept of a ‘work in progress’. Richard Bouwman’s latest work can indubitably be considered as being of great relevance within the context of new painting from the eighties until the present day. He has certainly found his own niche within this eclectic approach to painting.
Ernest Van Buynder, President of the Museum of Contemporary Art MuHKA, Antwerp Translated from the Dutch by Yonah Foncé, MuHKA
