Christian Rex Van Minnen: La luz atrapada

"Madrid is one of painting's Holy places, and it’s with a mixture of nervous humility and grateful excitement I present La Luz Atrapada at VETA by Fer Francés”. Christian Rex van Minnen has produced, during this past year and specifically for his first solo show at the gallery, a body of work that draws heavily on the work of Velázquez, Goya, Sánchez Cotán and the Spanish tenebrist school in general. Van Minnen thus reflects a way of working with painting whose objective was, in his own words, “to artfully manipulate light with brilliant Earth materia suspended in translucent oil”. This is precisely the origin of the title of this exhibition: La Luz Atrapada, meaning, the trapped light.

This same concept appears often in the poetic language of hermeticism, alchemy and mysticism, from Hermes Trismegistus to Rumi and Rilke, and it is none other than the light of the soul seeking union with the source. Like the light that moves through paint and oil until it finally returns to the eye.

The paintings that make up this exhibition are the result of a year of inward exploration by the artist, of a “movement through darkness towards light, to find, all of the sudden, an opening of a window and something new". The first works he painted were the two horizontal pieces, which feel, van Minnen expresses, like “the claustrophobic ecstasy and terror of the inner experience of self, the dissolution of boundaries, the deflation and reinflation of ego, and the cognitive dissonance one feels careening thru this murky territory”. In the studio, working on these two works and in search of a pictorial language that could express a longing for the transcendental, van Minnen then recalls the work of Ambrosius Bosschaert. In the still lives of flowers in front of windows by this Flemish painter, van Minnen then finds “a near ready-made compositional formula perfectly suited to express this relationship between the three perceived boundaries of self (marble/stone/window), the eye/visual phenomenon (still life) and God/Alien/Other/Spiritual Realm (sky)”. If hell, as someone said, is a windowless room, that is precisely what van Minnen finds and begins to paint.

Once finished and in front of these window paintings that are now displayed at the gallery, van Minnen feels a "kind of sudden dis-abstraction about what we are, what our bodies are, what this all is, leaving me feeling at times chilled to the bone, and making the nervy claustrophobic pain of Hallelujah feel like a relatively cozy space. But it is what it is, as above so below, round and round we go”.