2001.09: Peter Breevoort

'On the Meuse'- Peter Breevoort paints
(excerpts from a correspondence)

Rotterdam, September 1st 2001

Dear Peter,

Recently you invited me into your studio to look at your current project: ten large paintings of the Meuse-river at Rotterdam. You wanted to know whether they might inspire me as an art-historian and art-critic.

[…]

I recall my recent visit – it was a smoldering summer’s evening – to your new studio: a waterfront location once again. Years ago you worked in an old factorybuilding at the edge of the Schie-canal, then later on in an all but withered warehouse at ‘Keile’-docks (architects Van den Broek & Bakema in their time certainly knew how even buildings like this could be designed into something special!). Now you’ve settled down into a deserted office-building pitched at a quai of ‘Waal’-docks: waterside-painting once again. We drink mineral water and wine, enjoying a wide-angle view of the grand harbour-basin, nowadays deserted and empty; the river itself serves as a backdrop: it’s full of ships passing by – barges, containerships and the odd oil-tanker. In the front plane, hercules-like, a floating hoist, robust but silenced. Inside, naval commerce gave way to art: tables full of pots and tubes and brushes in all shapes and sizes; all walls are lined with the harbour-sized canvasses of river-views that you want to show me – some still in a scetch-phase, others seemingly more ‘finished’. While we inspect them, I feel the presence of your older work behind me, piled up on shelves under the ceiling: whole series of landscapes and cityscapes, of portraits of yourself in various guises and of fellow-artists – painters and writers, long dead or still alive – and countless variations of chef-d’oeuvres of Admired Masters (Van Gogh, Picasso, Delacroix, Gaugain – to name but a few). All of them tributes to the Art of Painting, to Art in general. At the same time they are both dexterous ‘études’ in painterly virtuoso, and at the same time displays of just that. “Through my painting I want to confront people with Beauty”, you told me years ago during one of my visits to your icy Schie-side studio. I take it that that still holds?

You show me your current project in-the-making. Ten large canvasses. Their square size both suprises and puzzles me. Within the tradition of landscape-painting this format is rather unique. Old Masters preferred oblong canvasses for capturing the grandness and man-transcending size of the natural scenery in one single gaze. The ‘panorama’ of the 18th and 19th centuries, set in-the-round, is the ultimate form of landscape-painting: unable to look beyond the painted universe, one could easily drown in it…
You prefer the square format. But however long I contemplate, it itches. Maybe it’s just compositional aspects: without one axis dominating, neither a vertical nor a horizontal one, the gazing eye cannot escape – neither upward nor to the right or left. One gets stuck, as it were. In only a few of your canvasses I recognize the spatiality that to me is so characteristic of the river once I sail its waters, away from its banks. On most of your rivers the view is blocked by the steel flanks of ships, towering like walls, by city-like piles of containers or by buildings directly at waters’ edge. Your river seems to be much more crowded than mine…
You based your paintings, as you explain me, on photos that you and your girlfriend Suzy Ann took during a lengthy cruise through Rotterdam harbour; subsequently, these were edited in Photoshop by Suzy Ann – even a craftsman-painter like you seems unable to escape computers… During this process you must have willfully reduced the original oblong format of your pictures – did you take them horizontally? – into squares. I wonder why. I try to imagine the difference between ‘a row of ten square canvasses’ and ‘ten horizontal oblongs’: in latter case they would form ‘ten dashes’, ‘legato’ or ‘andante’/in motion – to put it in musical terms; I take it that your version will result in ‘ten dots’ – ‘staccato’/a full stop.
I can’t stop thinking that you exploited the photoshopping-process also to ‘improve’ your river-views by densifying them, piling up the various motifs – thus, most of your paintings look condensed and compact. It makes your river seem even more heroic. Your river impresses me as ‘intensified reality’.

[…]

I interpret the provisional title of your river-project – ‘On the Meuse’ – both as a geographical tag as well as a dedication and form of address. Unlike river-scapes from the past, you don’t view upon the river from its banks or hovering over it, but from the water itself. You stood not ‘at’ but ‘on top of’ the Meuse, in the midst of boats and ships and riverine constructions.
However, I do find your river rather anachronistic – you show us a ‘river of labour’, a river of masculine-muscular heroism full of sturdy boats and big, heavy machinery under skies full of imposing cloudscapes and dramatic sunsets. No people are to be seen, although in previous paintings you proved yourself a skilled ‘people-painter’. “People would be too tiny, they would not fit into the monumentality I want to achieve” – as you told me on the phone when I questioned you. So there are no hefty dockers in view (still called that in today’s TUC-jargon?), nor ship-captains or sailors, and neither do we see joggers at Boompjes-embankment, no promeneurs along Wilhelmina-quai, no commuters coming in by fast-ferry, no fun-shoppers or leisure-captains on the terraces of Old Harbour and the renovated Entrepôt-dock, no festival-goers or fireworks-gazers, nor even ‘idle anglers’ at the pontoons of the watertaxi. The river you show us has over the past twenty years all but completely streamed away from the city’s centre, drifting westward toward newly-dug docks at Botlek, Europoort and, way beyond the coastline, the Maasvlakte: new worlds that don’t touch upon the lives of contemporary city-dwellers but during touristic river-cruises. Post-industrial cities like Rotterdam nowadays are developing into ‘fun-cities’, in which rivers are largely considered as potential ‘leisure’-spot. You seem to hardly see that. ‘On the Meuse’ seems to me a tribute to a river that has disappeared out of sight, to an era that has been lost a long time ago.
This interpretation – within the genre of the ‘history-piece’ – also gives me a clue to the project’s dimensions: ten canvasses of two by two meters each will combine into a picture of over twenty meters wide. Unlike your colleagues from the past, you do not aim at one single, all-encompassing and therefore univocal view; ‘On the Meuse’ will be a kaleidoscopic panorama of ten separate images, loosely sewn together by ‘water’, ‘sky’ and the horizon-line. As of principle, such a compositional strategy could potentially show many faces of this one river: in that case ‘On the Meuses’ would be a better title– it’s just too bad that you don’t more fully exploit that possibility – as yet?

Ten paintings in-the-making, two by two meters each. A daunting job! It will be quite something to digest for the beholder, and at the same time I try to imagine what this must mean for you as a painter: to paint at such scale. How can one get a grip on it. Your pictorial style has always been boldly-lyrical, but this must be quite a ‘tour de force’. Take, for example, the wide and sturdy strokes that have put the paint onto the canvas: gestures befitting the sturdiness of the scenes depicted. No evidence of ‘struggle’ with paint or ‘fights’ on the canvas – you seem to have mastered the ‘tricks of the trade’. You tell me that while painting you let yourself be guided by painting itself, and permit yourself to be completely dazzled and surprized by the workings of the paint on the canvas: “Look at these drippings, aren’t they wonderfull? And here, see how these colours intermingle to resemble ‘water’”.
Soon they will be finished, your ten paintings of ‘the river’. You would then like to exhibit them, preferably all in one row, in a public location in this city that’s still one of shipping and transport after all. All together, the paintings will form an ensemble of over twenty meters wide – poor spectators! I’d like to warn them beforehand: “Don’t let yourselves be deceived: you’re not looking at ‘ten times the river’, but at ‘ten paintings’, at ten times ‘the painter paints’ – Peter Breevoort in this case. And just like all good authors lie the truth, all good painters, too, are liars.” Of course: you touch many a sensitive vein: which Rotterdammer is not genuinely proud of what many still consider to be ‘the biggest port of the world’? Nostalgia tastes far better than reality, even better than visions of future. I guess the audience will readily swallow all of it.
Yet I hope that people will not just look at ‘the images’, at your ‘river’ – it’s your good right as an artist to lie about just that. What’s true, realy ‘true’, is ‘painting’ itself – I hope people will look at that, too. ‘What you see is what you get’, or may rather even ‘what you see is what you see’: broad brushstrokes, firm gestures (the canvasses are taller than man!), paint-drippings (both vertically as well as horizontally…), confluences of colours while the paints were still wet, veritable reliefs of gobs and strokes, and the effects of daylight on these. I also hope that people will appreciate the display of pictorial languages – both in the series as a whole as well as in the individual paintings: sometimes coarse and almost abstract, sometimes almost photorealistic; here the paints have been applied in thick layers, there very economically and transparantly; exaggerated perspectives side-by-side to expressive, sometimes even Expressionist colouration; while still drinking in almost ‘kitschy’ beauty one gets sobered up by patches of deliberate ugliness; often the language is explicit, but now and then it’s merely suggestive (‘look, what’s there isn’t there’ – you show Erasmusbridge by leaving it out – un-painted…).
All of this is overwhelming, and not just by mere size and scale. This is the Beauty of painting, this the Beauty of your river. You did it again!

[…]

Best regards,

Guus