The exhibition is based on the realization that Schuppers and Voskuil, starting from the same artistic inquiry, ultimately took opposite directions. For both artists this inquiry began in the late 1980s with naturalistic painting and the question of how, as an artist, one could still give meaning to that medium. The depiction of reality was the first thing both artists quickly abandoned. What remained was the painting itself, consisting of the stretcher frame with canvas on the one hand and the paint on the other.
Schuppers’ turn was toward the paint itself — the pictorial space, the surface of paint. For his paint manipulations he uses unconventional techniques. With solvents he affects applied layers and then moves the dissolved paint in a process-based way. Through this detour, illusionistic (photo)realistic paintings seem to emerge again — of… well, of what actually?
Voskuil’s turn concerns the stretcher frame and the painter’s canvas, the physical space of the painting. He manipulates the stretcher frame into a three-dimensional construction that he subsequently stretches with canvas. In this way he creates a undulating surface with an organic character. Whereas painting for him previously consisted of depicting the world using light and dark (chiaroscuro) and perspective, he has replaced imitation with actual space and with real effects of shadow and light. He often uses these spatial paintings as modules with which he constructs a new, abstract world.