Janine Van Oene‘s colourful and dynamic paintings seem abstract at first glance, but always have a recognisable element: a tentacle, a leaf, seafood or fish. Slats, windows and flowers return as a graphic element. This creates a contrast in shapes, between the hard lines and the flowing movements.

The medium of painting itself is the core of Janine van Oene’s practice. The buttery quality of oil paint, the magic of mixing and the hunt after the right color is what drives her. For Van Oene stretching a canvas and preparing the paint is like setting the table for dinner; starting with a basis of carefully chosen linen she slowly works towards a composition that over time carries vases, dishes and decorative napkins folded into fans. Van Oene’s work is abstract in nature, but finds its origin in still lifes and the depiction of interiors. The images give a suggestion of raw fish on shiny dishes, scallops and fruit or laced curtains, but remain obscure to unambiguous interpretation. Layer after layer she searches a way out of the abstraction, back to a rather melancholic fake reality of outdated interiors, plastic flowers and forgotten curtain patters. She hunts for absurd and excessively stylised details in faded magazines and in memory drenched objects, to let these resurface in the work in unexpected ways. This motionless world is brought to life with the physical act of painting large calligraphic forms, intuitive moves in a puzzle Van Oene has to solve by pushing herself always further towards a solution.

Janine van Oene (1988, NL) lives and works in Amsterdam (NL). In 2014 she graduated from the HKU University of Arts in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and was s resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 2014 to 2016. In 2017 she was awarded the Dutch Royal Prize for Modern Painting. The work of Van Oene is at home in various collections, such as De Nederlandsche Bank, KMPG, The Royal Art Collection and ING Art Collection, AkzoNobel, among many others. In 2022 she had a solo show in the Stedelijk Museum Kampen and a duo show with Ricardo van Eyk in Centraal Museum Utrecht.

In the early 1990s, Jacqueline Peeters started making invitation cards and posters for fictitious exhibitions of unsold paintings in non-existent galleries – a cry for attention and an attempt to get her career off the ground. This marketing offensive became the subject of her work. Under the name of Madame de Parme, Peeters made bold paintings with the text Unsold Painting no. 41, no. 42, et cetera, and painted price lists of her unsold works.

In her recent paintings, Peeters imagines the herringbone parquet floors of her dream galleries. Some have English words on them, such as browned, foxed, torn, or burnt, qualifications which are used in old master auction catalogues. They refer to the hundreds of paintings and drawings that Peeters has been storing in an old shed near her house for years and to the poor state in which they would undoubtedly have been found if her oeuvre had not emerged from oblivion.

Some of her unsold paintings have been painted over to create small windows offering glimpses of the underlying painting. Her playing with the past and the present is also visible in the paintings about her Dutch-Indo family tree which are both a playful nod at the identity debate and a tribute to her ancestors.

Names play an important role in Peeters’s paintings. For example, she makes a connection between her family tree and the titles of works by Édouard Manet (La Brune) and Henri Matisse (La Mulâtresse). In other paintings she combines her first name with the names of a woman named Jacqueline (John F. Kennedy, Pablo Picasso). The result is both a light-hearted and dramatic poem-painting with Boolean operators.

About the artist:

Jacqueline Peeters (b. 1961, Eindhoven) lives and works in Geraardsbergen, Belgium. She studied at the Academie voor Beeldende Vorming in Tilburg and was a resident at Ateliers 63 in Haarlem from 1984 to 1986. In 1987 she won the Royal Award for Modern Painting. She had solo exhibitions at Motta Art Books in Eindhoven (1991), Kabinett in Bern (1998), Galerie van het Rhok in Brussels (Ballad of Supply and Demand,1999), Zazà Ramen in Milan (Unsold Paintings, 2020) and a trio exhibition at Wals in Herzele (2022).