Gallery Baton is pleased to present the third solo' show “Sign'Waves” by Koen van den Broek (b.'1973), a painter who has built up a solid presence in Europe and has gained a global reputation.
The title of the exhibition “Sign Waves” is the main subject embracing a wide spectrum of his paintings. It is a notion which the artist has had in mind while he produces the paintings and is also a signpost directly and ideologically connected to each piece of work.
In the works capturing roadsides of certain places, such as Havana (2015), there are coloured steel frame structures that were intended to have roadnames or waymarkarrows written on. However these signs are deliberately removed in the paintings. This absence emphasises the eliminated presence, drawing an uncanny effect, creatin gun familiarity in ordinary scenes.
When the artist delivers an object from photography to painting by modifying its colour and magnifying or diminishing the image, the outcome attains a permanent disjunction from the original developed picture. Thus throughout Koen’s approach in which anonymous places are the keymotif, the sign is not the sign anymore.
