‘2008: I have always wanted to make “openings/transparencies” even in my surrealistic period (before 1979) there were parts missing from the fence so you could peep through. There is always an opening somewhere, also in the transparency of the colours and in the openness of the vision. And the light! You have to be able to see something behind the vision, more than you can actually see in the painting. Transparency and layers that’s what I am looking for.’
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Expositions:
download exposition list (pdf)

 

A collector view:

Hans Cohen about Daan Lemaire >>

 

Website:
daanlemaire.exto.org

 

Daan Lemaire

The unexpected

Daan Lemaire, born in 1942, has become a painter/artist who tries to catch the unexpected in his own work. He once said he worked very hard to keep the definite result of his painting process open and formless as long as possible. Painting as an ongoing, never-ending process.

 

His start

After a few years at the art academy Lemaire moved to Amsterdam in 1963 and started oil-painting on canvas in a surrealistic style with soft colors. It was around 1980 that Mark Rothko’s art made a strong impression on him, and this stimulated the start of his own abstract painting, still with very soft colors. It is the color white he preferred most during these years. Besides that, he was a very patient painter who gave the painting itself a lot of time to grow.

Watercolor – gouache

After a few years his color started to show more strength, especially in his gouaches on paper, which Lemaire started to paint as well as his canvas paintings. These gouaches gave him a free area in which to make his own adventures and discoveries, but they quickly became independent artworks in their own right. Gouache paint can be used in a very direct and transparent way, and Lemaire exploited both aspects. Where his abstract oil paintings were more gentle and soft, his gouaches gave a stronger expression, in brush stroke as well as in color.

Recent years

Since 2005 he no longer paints in oils but only in gouaches. This started after a visit to a show of Sam Francis’s abstract art in Amsterdam. This offered him a new and more dynamic approach for his own painting. Also, looking at Claude Monet’s later paintings, Lemaire discovered new and unexpected perspectives. From there, an intensive exploration in gouache painting started, in which all kinds of possibilities in painting were explored. In colour, in vanishing or pronounced forms, in atmosphere, depth and especially in all sorts of different ways of putting paint on the paper. In this way the ‘line’ started to disappear from his new art. No lines, so no boundaries were accepted any more. The created image should just give a visual moment without any boundary or limitation. That is why his recent paintings exhibit such a huge freedom, but still in his typical delicate and atmospheric sense.

Subtle painting

Lemaire cannot deny his own personal history as a subtle painter, growing up in the Dutch tradition. He doesn’t want to, because he is aware of his connections and roots with the former abstract painters. This is the ground where he started his search for growing expression in his own art, with unexpected images and till now, unknown perspectives. And, always there is his typical gentle atmosphere in his paintings, and that delicate resonance between the colors.