Koen van den Broek

2015

Painting, 120 x 150 cm.
Materials: oil on canvas

Collection: Courtesy collectie Katrien Carbonez, New York.

Koen van den Broek uses filmmaker Fellini’s guideline and establishes a framework where he decides to lay down the law. He, by the way, breaks the law he usually applies to his work. The result is an atypical work of the artist with the dramatic tension of a filmic image. No wonder, because Van den Broek also relied on one of the epic final images of Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas. The figure that we see from the back looks at the hotel where mother and son are reunited, and then disappears from their lives. The pain and loneliness of that moment is captured in the dark composition. Van den Broek projected the film in his studio and took pictures from different angles of the screen, resulting in a distortion of the image. As part of the production Infinite Now, a new creation of Chaya Czernowin on the subject of World War I, we read the situation as that of a soldier saying goodbye to his civilian life. He looks at his home from a distance, while on the right there, we glimpse the glow of the front, mixed with a sunset that represents a certain end. Or is it like a sunrise and a new beginning?