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Henk Pander at Alysia Duckler - Portland, Ore - Brief Article

Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Sue Taylor

Henk Pander, the Pacific Northwest's elder statesman of figurative painting, was born in Haarlem and trained at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. His European heritage includes Expressionism, New Objectivity and a belief in art as a professional calling. Portraitist to the late Oregon governor Tom McCall, Pander also aspires to contemporary history painting; he recorded the wreck of the New Carissa off the Oregon coast in a series of monumental canvases in 1999.

This exhibition featured recent still lifes and allegorical set pieces as well as a large landscape titled Western Shore (Umatilla). Depicting the rusting corpse of an old van on a rocky river bank, this last painting documents the degradation of the natural environment--a common concern among regional artists--while extending Pander's interest in the memento mori.

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An elegiac quality suffused much of the work on view, especially Vanitas, a painting of skulls on a table draped with heavy fabrics, and Lost Time, a studio arrangement in which a pendulum clock is propped on an armchair and a lush plant grows in the foreground. Pander's compositions often include a landscape view at the upper left, but it's not clear whether the external world is glimpsed through a window or a magical void where a wall has fallen away. Theatricality and artifice prevail. In The Prophet, books and papers are displayed with flowers, a T square, watercolors and brushes; the exterior view in this case--cottages and a church--resembles an early van Gogh. A little painting of a landscape with windmill appears on the table, near an open Bible. Pander, in this instance, has created an homage to his father, a watercolorist and Bible illustrator. Here art becomes both cultural patrimony and family legacy.

A cache of letters exchanged by Pander's parents during their courtship is reverently treated in several still lifes, visual documents of written testimonials of love. The artist imagines the correspondents themselves in Writing Him and The Reply, in which a young woman and her bespectacled suitor sit at their respective writing tables, before windows admitting radiant light and indicating different times of year. As a colorist, Pander is generally restrained, but in his visions of his mother betrothed, startling reds, golden yellow and vibrant green enliven his palette. In The Letter, the raven-haired girl stands at her window in a scarlet dress, leaning forward to read a passionate missive. Her visible agitation and sensuous presence contrast with the relatively impassive calm of her predecessors in Dutch art, Vermeer's reading women. Elaborating a venerable tradition, Pander reaches his apogee with this epistolary series, sharing his most cherished and intimate revelations.

Henk Pander at Alysia Duckler - Portland, Ore - Brief Article

Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Sue Taylor

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