Ahab (2009) Pastel and pencil on paper 150 x 280cm
Looking at the work of Dutch artist Hans de Wit (1952) is a dizzying, exhilarating experience. These drawings hit you in a number of ways at once – organic and inorganic forms colliding, morphing, deteriorating, pushing, pulsing, falling and twisting; the scale is often huge, and then there’s the rush of howling sound. As we move closer to enjoy these visions that somehow recall the epic gestures of John Martin (1789), we begin to recognise elements; the dark and threatening hull of a submarine, a bushbaby…a gonad?… getting lost in the distance from edge to edge of the paper and the depth of the artist’s imagination.
De Wit moved his practice from painting to drawing some years back in a bid for figurative clarity and depth that was hard to capture in oil. Since then he has steadily built a major body of work that has been exhibited and collected widely in his home country. Exhibiting superlative technical facility combined with the most extraordinary visual ingenuity results in works that allow us, in these times, a rare sense of wonder and draw us into a ‘labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity’.*
www.isisgallery.org/
* The Doors of Perception (Aldous Huxley, 1954)
