Ralph Keuning Directeur Museum de Fundatie Director of Museum de Fundatie
Fried eggs, French fries, sandwiches and ketchup bottles, Barbie dolls, marbles and autumn leaves. Tjalf Sparnaay paints these trivial subjects, enlarging them to huge proportions, like thunderous blows to the retina. Tjalf Sparnaay (Haarlem 1954) was a gym teacher when he became fascinated by photography in the 1980s. Camera in hand, he set out to capture the day-to-day lives of those around him in snapshots. In the same period, he spent his free time developing his skills as a painter, inspired by the magic realism of Carel Willink. In the 1980s and 1990s, the subjects he framed in his photos – a squashed soda can, a bicycle on a bridge, or tulips in a vase – became the basic elements of his paintings. It was in those years that Sparnaay discovered photorealism, an American painting movement in which the artist paints reality as realistically as possible based on a photo, sometimes working from an enlarged snapshot, with the aim of depict- ing the cold, hard photographic representation in paint. Famous photorealists like Ralph Goings, Charles Bell and Richard Estes became his role models. As his style developed, Sparnaay adopted unique characteristics, enlarging reality to extreme proportions and moving away from the purely photographic image. He even started referring to it as megarealism.
Sparnaay does not stop at documenting reality; rather, he intensifies it by blowing up everyday objects to massive proportions. This approach gives him the opportunity to explore every detail meticulously, dissecting it layer by layer to reach the very es- sence of the subject. ‘My paintings,’ as Sparnaay explains it, ‘are intended to enable the viewer to re-experience reality, rediscover the essence of the object that has become so commonplace. I want to reduce it to the DNA of the universal structure, in all its beauty. I call it “the beauty of the ordinary”.’ The way Sparnaay works directly references the seventeenth century. His lucid use of color and keen eye for detail and refinement come close to Vermeer, while the use of light in his paintings references the interplay of light and shadow in works by Rembrandt. Sparnaay embroiders on the rich seventeenth-century Dutch tradition of the still life, but with his own unique, con- temporary style. He is always looking for new images that have never been painted before. He finds them in his own surroundings. ‘By using trivial, everyday objects, I allow reality to flow through my brush all over again. My intention is to invest these objects with a soul and give them a fresh new presence.’ Closer, on display in Museum de Fundatie, shows how a painting can simultaneously be ordinary and monumental. My initial confrontation with the work of Tjalf Sparnaay, a painting of a huge glass salad bowl filled with mixed greens, was an extraordinary experience. The almost automatic, near-intimidating moment of amazement at his craftsmanship, his total technical control, the delight in the process of enlargement – the floating slice of egg that seems like a planet, the humor of the intensely banal and the subtlety of its beauty – my eyes were inescapably drawn to the rim of his majestic salad bowl. We, and by that I mean those of us who visit museums constantly, have learned to feast our eyes on the expressive brushstrokes of the master artists. The magic of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, sometimes exhibitionistic and sometimes understated. Since Sparnaay so evidently owes a debt to the cool, almost impersonal tradition of American photorealism, it would be easy to become entangled on the surface of the total impression. After all, why does the artist enlarge his objects to such an extent? Is the only aim to give the objects a new presence, as he explains it? Or is there some hidden agenda? The rim of the salad bowl teleported me back to 1990, when I was working as an assistant in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Germany. Dieter Honisch, museum director at the time, had just managed to acquire a fantastic piece by American artist Morris Louis: Beta Zeta. A large, almost empty, unprimed canvas with meandering stripes of color along the edges to the left and right, like dripping fingers. The work came in all rolled up and it took everyone we had to spread it out on the ground in a large room, so it could be attached to a frame and be raised to its place of honor. A majestic ode to the art of painting, an encapsulated story with infinite layers
Standing in front of Sparnaay’s salad bowl, I suddenly saw that Morris Louis before me in the curving rim of the salad bowl, not as a quote but as a congruent interplay of colors and shapes. This observation delivered the true key to his work. Sparnaay’s megarealism enchants us, with his provocative enlargement and virtuosity, in his commentary on the objects that surround us, but the essence of his oeuvre lies in the hegemony of art. The fact that a canvas with paint on it can compress a world of experiences into a single moment, can become a philosopher’s stone in which we can drown. Allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the huge sandwich, as I was, but then set out in search of the Turners, Monets and Mondriaans in the crumbs. In Tjalf Sparnaay’s work, painting overcomes the mega-world.
I would like to thank Tjalf Sparnaay for the confidence he has entrusted in us, in holding his first major museum exhibition at Museum de Fundatie, and for the exceptionally pleasant partnership. I am grateful to the owners who have loaned us paintings for the exhibition, for their willingness to temporarily relinquish their precious paintings into our care. Museum de Fundatie is only able to organize its exhibitions thanks to the ongoing engagement of the Province of Overijssel, the Municipality of Zwolle, the BankGiro Loterij and its sponsors: my heartfelt thanks to them all.
Allow me to close by wishing you all the best in exploring Tjalf’s work, both in the museum and in these pages.