Near to the Echo Painting

Everything is possible in the paintings of Bas Wiegmink. Nature attains the power to evolve. Vegetation undergoes genetic changes. Remnants of humanity indicate a certain 'civilisation'. The message could be: 'don't be afraid of the future, we will survive.' Bas Wiegmink paints with lots of contrasts in an exuberantly romantic color palette, sometimes even fluorescent. The cinematic and dreamy way of painting makes watching interesting. Trees and plants grow wild in between buildings. The exuberant flora has taken up all the space, sometimes you also see remains of human life. What is happening here? In the background we see modern buildings painted in thin contours, as if they were abandoned or languishing. On the front he paints flora with powerful convincing keys in bold colors. This contrast betrays the ambiguity of reality: a warning or an optimistic Arcadia. The modernists often designed utopian architecture to which man seems to be subordinate. Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier and urban planner Lucio Kosta built the iconic city of Brasilia in the 1950s to replace the capital, Rio De Janeiro. In it we see human overestimation and pride. Man there shows himself to be a vain creature against nature that remains itself. This architecture is often regarded as merely conceptual, doomed to mankind for failure. Here you experience the friction between people and the environment. Architecture and nature, city and people are connected, but at the same time they struggle with each other for quality of life. Nevertheless, nature always survives seemingly undisturbed. Bas Wiegmink inspires that survival power, including that of humans. For him, painting is the expression in which he can best express himself, his dream in an act. There is no hint of melancholy in the work, everything seems so obvious. Here his admiration for architecture merges with that for the force of nature