De Agostini, red. Prof. Daniele Radini Tedesci and dr. Stefania Pieraliice, english translation

VAN EEGHEN, LUCAS

Lucas van Eeghen was born in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1953. He studied in the Netherlands, attending the Kunstacademie Minerva in Groningen and the Vrije Academie Psychopolis in the Hague between 1976 and 1979. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam. His artistic activity mainly focuses in the field of painting, a discipline he approaches with great originality, recovering the typical technique of traditional craftsmanship and by experimenting with personal and never conventional forms of expression. He prefers acrylic colors, tempera and oils as pictorial tools, through which he develops suggestive paintings and three-dimensional works, from which transpire atmospheres that are floating in time and space.

The first works of van Eeghen are mainly in a figurative trend. It is a large group of works that, in their chromatic and stylistic choices, refer to the symbolist Ferdinand Khnopff and the Dutch Johannes Vermeer. Some of these frame metropolitan views of New York and the interiors of public buildings, dwelling variously on the long perspective corridors, on the doors of entrances to halls and restaurants or on the twentieth-century furnishing details of cafes.

NY (2)                                                         Thriller                                                                                   Roma                                                                Keijzer 1

The same thematic series includes paintings dedicated to the Netherlands. The beauty comes alive in the panorama of Amsterdam, the decay of a neo-Gothic church (Vondelkerk) and the Gothic architecture of a church in Alkmaar (Dominicus kerk).

Panorama Amsterdam

Vondelkerk (2)                                        Dominicuskerk (1)                                Dominicuskerk (2)                        Oude schans

An investigation of daily reality that also touches more intimate and expressive strings is the series family scenes. In this case, Van Eeghen offers a wide range of self-portraits, portraits of children and elderly mothers, sometimes in interiors with an intalian flavor, as is the case in Stromboli Villa Limone. The dwellings are intimate, warm and visually linked to the interior scenes of 17th-century Flemish and Dutch paintings

Elmer (1)                                           Mother                                                                                        Stromboli, villa limone

Still part of the first figurative series are the Gulf War paintings. However, the artist opens here up to abstraction and a more conceptual language. Very interesting.

Black square war                                                        operation desert storm                                                ground wars eve

Subsequently he has come to the creation of works such as Blue and Red or Triptiek, a tribute to the masters of American abstract Expressionism, clearly inspired by the monochrome paintings of Mark Rothko.

Blue and red                                          Triptiek (2)

In his more recent works, he initiates a particular aesthetic research of the three-dimensionality of the pitoric image, using the mixed techniques to develop paintings of a suggestive impact, such as Butterflies Picknic (2011), Enigma (2012) and Alla nuova vita (2015). He is the unchallenged protoganist of nature, almost endangered, modeled and shaped through a highly creative expressive path. Van Eeghen, the alchemist of the twenty-first century, captures photographic details of the animal and vegetable Kingdom, defined through bright colors and wisely distributed. His intuitive and recognizable images are suspended between organic and artificial, detached from their support and visually inserted in a prominent position within the composition. They literally enter into the spectator's space.

Butterflies Picknic                                                                                     Alla nuova vita                                                Enigma        (sideview)                                                        Libera me

In the recent works such as Out of the blue (2018) and La magie de la vie (2019) the artist offers emotionally charged images, imbued with a formidable and passionate power and poetic sensitivity.

Out of the blue        (sideview)                                        the magic of life (sideview)

Van Eeghen evokes a vocabulary of archetypes and iconographic models, constructing the surface with a schematic and at the same time baroque approach, in which the simple canvas transforms into a sort of high relief, thus breaking through the boundary of the plane. With this type of work, the artist expertly arrives and reworks the traditional relationship between himself and nature, where the dividing line between organic and artificial begins to evaporate. The fish, leaves, and shrubs of van Eeghen's images are raised to eternity. His poetics therefore develops starting from the idea of a primordial harmony between the individual and the environment. In this sense, art was born to satisfy this desire to return to the origins, with an invitation to feel and touch, to reveal the mystery of creation.

With his enigmatic and original production, Lucas van Eeghen has been enjoying wide acclaim from the public and critics for years, obtaining numerous awards. Also noteworthy are the personal and collective exhibitions in which the artist took part, with imposing presences in New York, Munich, London, Amsterdam and Rome.