Joya: AiR / Stijn Kriele / NLD
photo Simon Beckmann
“The first two weeks of October 2019, I had the privilege of working in Cortijada Los Gázquez, home to Joya: AiR. In the weeks prior to my departure I was busy with the preparations. In which discipline do I want to work? Painting, drawing, monotype, collage, photography? On the one hand you don't want to limit yourself but at the same time it can be helpful . Then there are the practical matters such as tickets, car rental, luggage, directions to get there, etc. In order to prepare myself I collect as much information as possible about the location. Endless hours of tracking on google earth: the landscape, vegetation, routes, surrounding villages. Hoping that somehow this information is meaningful. The first hours after my arrival I realised that despite all the planning I could not prepare for what I encountered and what happened to me in the following weeks.
My studio offered a fantastic view of the surrounding landscape. As the day progressed, this landscape underwent magnificent colour changes. I spent most of my stay in the studio. The calming effect of this space has had a great influence on the course of my stay. I had planned to spend a lot of time in the landscape. But gradually the need became less and less. The studio, my work, my music and the light were my companions. And for most of the time this was enough for me.
Nevertheless, contact with other artists and the hospitality of Donna and Simon have been a crucial part of my stay. They were my "family", my safety net. I intensely enjoyed the regular evening ritual. Donna's cooking is unsurpassed and forms the basis for a wonderful gathering and a perfect conclusion of every working day.
I thought long and hard about what I wanted to write about my stay and work. But I am increasingly aware that this will never do justice to my experiences. What struck me most during my stay and still does, is what an immensely generous gesture it is of Donna and Simon to give artists time. This seems like an open door, and perhaps it is. But I can't believe how Joya: AiR's initial concept and the way in which Donna and Simon have given it form has affected me so deeply. Every day I became more aware of how time seemed to slow down. And how happy that made me”.
Stijn Kriele
Stijn Kriele’s recent work is all about how the tides’ movements influence the landscape. The artist from Tilburg (the Netherlands) emphatically focuses on the dutch (constructed) landscape. He translates his observations into works on paper, oil paintings and photographs in which shades of green and grey dominate and where peace and quiet, clarity and serenity are of the highest importance. The man-made landscapes Kriele photographed are so highly organised and choreographed that the photographs approach the core tenets of fundamental painting. Air, water, bunkers, breakwaters, poles, landing jetties, gravel beds and sandy expanses which together constitute more or less geometrically organised compositions that consist of straight lines, planes and horizontal bands. The photographs nevertheless concern concrete observations, recorded by the camera, which have not been manipulated. This also applies to the photograph of the droplets on the rain slicked window pane. It would be convenient to term the painter’s approach minimalist or formal, but that would not do justice to the expeditions he undertakes. Kriele wants to access the essence of experiencing a landscape and to get the most from a minimal use of image elements, but does not do so dogmatically. The options are dictated by the image elements present. In his paintings and works on paper, the artist is free to determine the setting, the palette, the lines and the distribution of planes. However, there are definitely visible similarities between the photographs and the ‘free’ paintings. These correspondences can be attributed to the way in which Kriele observes the landscape, the manner in which he selects elements and translates his observations.