Toon Verhoef
Goeben, Berlin 30 October – 27 November
Looking through the windows of the project space Goeben is, during this exhibition, a preliminary act for scrying: pour water over some tea leaves, as it were, and start drinking. Walk inside and peer into the leaves at the bottom of the cup. Or forget about tea and rather transpose this mindset of divination, of finding meaning in whatever you deem a suitable medium, to looking at Toon Verhoef ’s eight abstract, mostly largescale paintings. Doing just this, I begin to see an orange-hued tree in one, logs falling against a pristine blue sky in another. Elsewhere, cigarettes float among sunsets. A bat hangs from the top of another canvas – or maybe it’s an opossum. Most resonantly, most darkly, it’s a human in a straitjacket hanged from their feet. According to the press release, the Dutch artist’s paintings supposedly take moments of reality as their starting points, but each one is ripe for individual projections. Accordingly, almost like a Rorschach test, what I see tells me more about myself and the current state of my unconscious than the artist’s intentions.
The untitled works date from 2013 to 2021, though Verhoef has been honing his artistic language since the 1960s. In this small but mighty show it becomes apparent that this language is precisely the absence of one: he avoids pigeonholing himself into one vein of abstraction, forgoing a signature handwriting in favour of continuous experimentation. Yet his experimentation is exacting, his combinations of acrylic and oil expertly applied to linen canvases. In many works, Verhoef conveys a sense of movement through wide, swooping brushstrokes, but he knows to stop at just the right moment, and when to restore order through rigid, geometric forms. A tension is at play in the surfaces, too; some are almost perfectly smooth – an e¥ect achieved by painting onto the front and back of a layer of transparent binding agent that is later a¦xed to the canvas – while raw linen is left exposed on others.
The mesmerising suite of works embodies what Arshile Gorky once said: abstraction enables the artist – and, I would argue, the viewer – ‘to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite’. Verhoef begins with sketches from lived experiences, but the final pieces reveal nothing of the sort. Instead, his process of creating the works, and the viewer’s deciphering, allow for what Gorky deemed an ‘emancipation of the mind’. Emily Mcdermott