ECOS DE KENYA

Poen de Wijs

Poen de Wijs (Dutch artist) 1948 - 2014
Schetsboek uit Kenia-6 (Kenyan Sketchbook-6), 1995
mixed media on paper
50 x 65 cm.
signed Poen de Wijs
private collection

………And after culture, in recent years increasing room has been made for nature in Poen de Wijs' work, a development still in progress. Trips to Eastern Africa with its immense scenery and its unique tribes and scenic areas have contributed enormously. They profoundly appealed to Poen and intensified his sense of beauty and harmony.
Dreamlike images from the studio give way to images from the multiracial reality. Since the early Nineties Poen has intensively visited other countries that left memories which gradually fitted into his view of the world. At first still as an ode to youth and beauty (The Great Meeting, 1995).
Although here he neither doses his eyes nor his mind to the harsh reality of this continent, aesthetic images invariably appear on the canvas when hè allows himself to be inspired by Africa. Yet, there is a vast difference.

Besides children and young models, in Poen's circle old African men, elephants with crackled skins, monks, lions.

Folded sheets and cloths enveloping the eternal youth of yesteryear are completed with the spent wrinkles of old age. But even in this transitoriness Poen chiefly sees beauty. For thus is his circle of life.

Text Gerard Kerkvliet, from “Poen de Wijs” – publication by De Twee Pauwen – 1998