MELODÍA DE MOMBASA

Poen de Wijs

Poen de Wijs (Dutch artist) 1948 – 2014
Mombasa Melody-2, 1993
oil on canvas
120 x 150 cm.
signed Poen de Wijs
private collection

The realist painter Poen de Wijs has reached technical and virtuoso the perfection. While for many painters the aim would be reached with this, for Poen it is no more than a starting point. A way to express himself purely. And in that purity, pictorial and musical, lies his origin. The term "Alma Musica", the nourishing music, can literally be applied to the work of Poen de Wijs. His childhood years still were more determined by classical music practice than by drawing. But instead of a study at the conservatoire, he chose for an education in painting at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.
Music, however, remained a recurring element in his work. Poen de Wijs brings all the elements together in harmony as he paints: the musicians, the movements that are associated with their instruments, depicting rhythmically their different attitudes, but also the environment: the depicted humans and animals are interconnected/connected to each other by abstractions, structures and more concrete, by symbols, objects, rugs, walls or other order creating frameworks. The artist doesn’t hesitate to weave divergent themes in his "compositions", such as elements from a recent trip to Africa, or quotes from paintings by Rembrandt, Newman and Picasso.
The technical virtuosity of Poen de Wijs seems almost a provocative response to the rejection of the painting techniques as they occurred frequently in the twentieth century. An antithesis which also can be found often in his painted theme "impermanence”: even the ugly, the decayed, becomes eternal beauty in the paintings of Poen de Wijs. Ugliness has had its day.

Text: Piet Bogaards catalogue accompanying the exhibition "ALMA MUSICA" - Gallery De Twee Pauwen, 1993