Kingdom of The Netherlands - Embassy in NYC
Orange Alert -Dutch Art Events
For his third solo show in New York City, van den Boog pushes the limits of portraiture by directly confronting emotion head-on by way of large-scale paintings of faces. Oil and acrylic paint make up the flesh tones and fine facial details while abstract strokes in rust tones, cerulean blues and greens are chemically etched into the cold lead surfaces becoming a powerful metaphor for the internal scars we all possess.
The imposing portraits depicted in the paintings, some as tall as 6 feet, are truncated from the body, consequently becoming nostalgic monumental ruins of a lost time. Akin to the brutal candor seen in the portraits of Jenny Saville and Lucian Freud, they surpass their own representation and acquire a bold, autonomous presence because of their distorted nature. They are not meant to remind the viewers of a specific person, but rather, they become an emblematic entity in and of themselves.