Between end and beginning #64: Richard van der Aa
Essay by Bertus Pieters, Villa la Repubblica, June 8, 2024
Text translated from Dutch with the help of Deepl and Google Translate.
The work of Richard van der Aa (1963) is considered “concrete art”. Art with a geometric,
abstract slant. Concrete art has a long history that starts with the coining of the term by Theo
van Doesburg (1883-1931) in 1930, and even before that. As was usual at that time, this was
accompanied by sharp-wittedness and some hostility. In the meantime, the dust has long since
settled. The term “concrete art” now has a broad meaning and has mainly to do with the
application of geometry in the work of art, whether it is based on rational geometry (as once
intended by van Doesburg) or inspired by extra-geometric matters. The latter is also diicult to
avoid, because geometry is not an isolated island in the world. Especially when the use of
colour is not quasi-objectively based on the three unmixed primary colours (red, yellow and
blue) in addition to black, white and grey, there is room for subjectivity, for the ‘colour of feeling’.
Van der Aa's work can be called hybrid. Certainly, it is always contained in geometric forms. In
recent years, the basis has often been the rectangle, whereby the rectangle often coincides with
the shape of the support, the ground. The corners of the rectangle may also be cut o or
rounded. In the composition, parts may be missing or something may have been added. There is
also often an interplay of two colours, or of white and a colour. The circle appeared earlier in his
work, but now circles do not seem to t into his story, and the triangle appears at most as part of
a rectangle. Whether this is all based on reasoned premises remains to be seen. It is quite
possible that this way of composing simply suits van der Aa well and, within those constraints,
he nds suicient freedom to show what concerns and inspires him. The development of
artistry leads to a certain narrowing of view, perhaps the only drawback of being an artist, but
that ensures that within the given limits, the artist cannot let himself miss any opportunities,
and that the work is recognisable to the viewer (which is a happy by-product). And further:
restrictions can of course be lifted by an artist, as he or she has the utmost freedom in this.
Back to the hybrid aspect in van der Aa's work. Take, for instance, his work A weekend in Prague.
The title suggests a memory, or the elaboration of a note from the time to which the title refers.
Again, the composition is originally rectangular, even square. The two top corners are cut at an
angle in the sense that there is no colour and they are partly painted white. However, the left
corner extends a little further towards the right, so that the remaining white triangles become
uneven. As a result, the composition becomes asymmetrical. The upper part of the
composition, bounded by the cut corners, is brown, so that the composition as a whole
resembles a building, the brown part being the roof. It may be a multi-storey building, it may
also be a much smaller kiosk, but that doesn't tell the story. It is a work that is both suggestive
and completely abstract, after all, the shape of a rectangular building with a sloping roof is itself
a geometric form that refers to nothing other than itself. On the other hand, that abstract form is
also immediately recognisable as a building. Whether van der Aa had a specic building in
Prague in mind is not clear from the work or the title; so that cannot matter any further.
The idiom of concrete art seems to leave no room for doubt or nonchalance. Van der Aa,
however, likes to display a certain nonchalance. This is clear at rst glance from the rectangular
part of the “building”. It is painted rather roughly and in smooth strokes of grey. The stroke
directions of the dierent gradations of white and grey overlap, and the whole area seems to be
coated with a misty liquid white. There are also some places where the paint was partially
repelled, ‘holy days” in painting jargon. Within this roughly painted grey plane, then, there is also
a compositional division. It is divided with the same emphatic nonchalance into a somewhat
darker rectangular area, framed on the left and above by a somewhat lighter piece, as if a
shadow from another building falls across the façade of the depicted building.
When you then take a closer look at the “roof”, which at rst glance is completely uniform in
colour, it turns out that it is not free from irregularities. The same goes for the hard edges of the
geometric shapes. Hard edges seem to emphasise a certain absoluteness in concrete art, but a
closer look reveals that absoluteness is relative in van der Aa's case. On the left side of the
boundary between the grey-grey and the brown, there is some doubt about where that boundary
ends: where the left roof point ends at the edge of the plane, it is partly painted over by the grey
of the façade, and it is impossible to determine which of the two planes maintains the correct
straightness. You could dismiss it as a mistake, a slip of the brush, on the part of the artist, but
that does not seem plausible with van der Aa, who has so much experience in applying
geometric shapes and sharp divisions. Perhaps it is based on a mistake, but it seems more like
a staged mistake, built in for the scrupulous viewer.
Also striking are the sloping parts of the roof, which are deantly asymmetrical; white paint
seems to have eliminated sloppiness there. The white paint even slightly covers the brown on
the right side.
Those casual touches in A weekend in Prague generally push against the limits of the
absoluteness of the intentions of concrete art. They give van der Aa leeway to show other
qualities of visual art. You can dismiss the sloppy paint strokes in the grey-grey section as such.
Within the concrete idiom, however, they are also a representation of uncertainty. The rational
wants one thing, but the materials, the pigments, the brushes, the diluents want something
else, and there is no escaping that. This creates a subtle game of gnawing at reason. It is as if
van der Aa is undermining his own idiom. You could then see it as a form of subversion, but then
there is the title. Van der Aa refers to an event. It is not clear whether it concerns an event he
experienced himself, or an event experienced "spiritually", whether it was a short city trip,
attending an exhibition opening in Prague, or reading about it, and that doesn't matter much
either. Ultimately it is about the memory of that event.
Memory is both beautiful and deceptive. Much of our thinking life - or our spiritual life, if you will
– is based on memory, even if you think you are only thinking about the future. It is tempting to
get stuck in memory because it has its own compulsions: it can be beautiful, moving or
horrifying, and this often causes the needle of thought to get stuck in memory. Memory itself is
deceptive because we tend to remember specic details and forget others, according to
convenience. Remembering and forgetting at the same time is a nonchalance, a subversion of
our own memory and of our own thinking. It is this subversion that characterises A Weekend in
Prague. The sharp concrete seems to be a pinned down certainty within the memory, the
subversion of the concrete seems to be the lling in of what is no longer remembered, or it is the
eetingness of memory, or it is the feeling of the memory that mysties concrete memory. The
subversion of the nonchalance provides the added value of the work that is diicult to put into
words - and that is just as well, because if it had been put into words, A Weekend in Prague
would not exist. After all, in the beginning is always the image.
Bertus Pieters
https://villalarepubblica.wordpress.com/2024/06/08/tussen-einde-en-begin-64-richard-van-der-aa/
Image: A weekend in Prague: Watercolour and acrylic on paper, 50 x 50 cm. Richard van der Aa, 2023.
