ESSAY BY DAVID DIMICHELE
Encountering a work by an artist one is unfamiliar with can sometimes be a memorable, even life-changing experience. The surprise at discovering something novel and unexpected can add to one’s enjoyment and appreciation of the artwork, experienced cold, with no prior knowledge or information. Such was my experience when I came upon Endless Painting, a work by Daan den Houter, in the Summer of 2015 at the Frank Taal Gallery in Rotterdam, Netherlands. In Holland for a residency, I had gone with a group of artists to an opening at the gallery, and was immediately captivated by the work, which consisted of a flat stream of white liquid paint that cascaded down in a continuous sheet in front of one of the gallery walls. The effect was rather like a minimalist monochrome painting, but it was not a “painting” at all but literally liquid paint, ingeniously manipulated to resemble a painting. The effect was achieved by utilizing a pump, which drew the paint from a receptacle below, delivered it to the top of the work and extruded it to form the surface of the “painting”. Having prior interest in monochrome painting, minimalism and conceptual art, the piece piqued my curiosity about this artist, whose work was new to me.
As it turned out, Endless Painting was a good introduction to den Houter’s art, because it embodied many of the qualities inherent in most of his work. It was conceptual, but also had a strong formal quality; the rippling surface of the sheet of paint, the white color, even the smell of the house paint worked directly on the senses. Also, the work’s conceptual strategy was focused on the medium of painting, an unusual quality for a conceptual piece. In fact, as I was to later learn, many of den Houter’s works deconstruct painting, especially abstract painting. His Ice Paintings, frozen abstractions that begin melting as soon as they are hung on the wall, soon becoming puddles of paint on the gallery floor, often resembling poured color field paintings from the 1960s and 70s. This masterful combination of both formal and conceptual concerns is a quality that especially distinguishes den Houter’s works.
Born in 1977, den Houter was too young to be around for the radical conceptual gestures created by artists in the 1970s, yet two artists from that period were amongst his early influences- Bas Jan Ader, a fellow Dutch artist and Los Angeles artist Chris Burden. Both artists created groundbreaking conceptual works during the 1970s that were performative, physical and sometimes dangerous. Jan Ader rode his bicycle into a canal as a performance, and later attempted to sail across the Atlantic Ocean solo in a 13 foot sailboat; he was subsequently lost at sea, the crossing constituting his last work of art. Likewise, Burden became notorious in Los Angeles in the same period for creating works like Shoot (1971), a famous performance in which the artist stood against a wall in a gallery and was shot in the arm with a rifle. The philosophical questioning that is behind artworks of this nature was to have a lasting effect on den Houter, who applied it’s influence to creating actual physical artworks, like paintings and sculpture, that are “post-conceptual”, not pure conceptual art, but object making that has been informed by it.
An example of this kind of approach would be the several works that den Houter has made that involve the concept of money. One work, which appeared at first to be a minimalist sculpture, consisted of 17 black concrete cubes; 16 were empty, but one contained 10,000 euros.
Collectors could purchase one (or more) cubes and becomes co-owner of the whole work ‘Keep On Dreaming 2018’. Buying the dream of having 10.000 euros. By the law of copyright of 1916 it’s forbidden to make any changes to an artwork combined with the concept having bought a collective dream, no owner will ever know if the euros are hidden in his or her cube.
The feeling of mystery that the work creates recalls Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise (1916) which has an unknown object hidden inside a ball of twine, as well as similar works by Yoko Ono. In another work, more purely conceptual and more performative, den Houter hid a 1000 euro note inside the wall of a gallery by removing part of the wall, putting the note inside and patching the wall so no trace of the act remained. After two years, the artist walked into the gallery during an opening with his tools and removed the 1000 euros, the action recorded on video. The video was subsequently shown in den Houter’s first show in Los Angeles, Inside the White Cube (2016), a group exhibition of works that all referenced the gallery space itself.
The city of Los Angeles, one of the world’s premier art centers, known for the experimentation and innovation of its artists, and a magnet for art students, became an important place for den Houter. He visited several times for subsequent exhibitions, including shows at Roberts Projects Gallery, the Torrance Art Museum, and PRJCTLA Gallery, which hosted a group show of Dutch and Los Angeles artists curated by LA gallerist Carl Berg, and den Houter’s gallerist in Rotterdam, Frank Taal. Like his mentors Jan Ader and Burden, den Houter is drawn to the region of Southern California and its art. Although he has always lived in Rotterdam there are other things that connect den Houter to the region, such as his early interest in skateboarding (he designed various skateparks in the Netherlands) and the “finish fetish” quality of a recent series of “paintings” made of colored resin inlaid into wood surfaces.
This series of “paintings that are not really paintings” (the artist’s words) are an interesting development for den Houter. They are, in a sense, deconstructions of abstract paintings because they breakdown the usual technique of making a painting on a canvas with brushes and acrylic or oil paint, a method that relies on hand movements, and is based in drawing. The mark of the hand is evident in most paintings and is so intrinsic to the art of painting that it defines most artwork made that way, even prior to Modernism. Modern Art, which really begins with Post-Impressionism, elevated the brush stroke to the highest status, so that by the early 20th century artists like Matisse were creating canvases that exulted exuberant brush strokes and the mark of the hand, and by mid-20th century, the American Abstract Expressionists would make the brushstroke their signature motif.
By contrast, den Houter’s method of creating dots, lines and shapes has no relation to the properties of paint, drawing and mark making, although one might assume they did upon a casual inspection. Rather, the myriad of lines that appear in his “paintings” are created by way of a process more related to furniture making- use of inlay. The artist carves the lines out of mahogany wood panels with a router, so they are initially negative shapes; these are then filled with epoxy resin that has been tinted with bright, highly saturated colors, and eventually meticulously sanded down to a perfectly flat surface. The dots and lines that appear in these works, while resembling the kind of mark made by a painter are really related more to sculpture techniques- carving and casting. So these “paintings that are not really paintings” are actually painting surrogates, related to Allan McCollum’s plaster paintings that he also refers to as “surrogates”.
Beyond this intriguing theory is the formal beauty of these works. Polychromatic, and surrounded by the neutral hue of the natural mahogany wood, the colors sing and vibrate. The colored resin produces intense colors, which den Houter tends to arrange in such a way as to make the most of simultaneous color contrast- the way colors affect the way adjacent colors appear. And then there is the appeal of the surfaces, carefully sanded down so that they are absolutely, positively flat, revealing virtually nothing about how they were made. This is unlike most paintings, which often appeal through the way the viewer can reconstruct the process of how the painting was created. If one was not privy to the method the artist uses, one might examine the works closely and wonder how the artist achieved such a flat surface with no texture or visible brushwork.
The dot and line works also relate to the quintessential Los Angeles movement know as “finish fetish”, a period that dates from the 1960s and 1970s that emphasized highly crafted artworks often made of resin and fiberglass. The movement was somewhat of a reaction to the raw and ragged quality of Abstract Expressionism, and was related to both Pop Art and Post-Painterly Abstraction. The use of plastic technologies used to make cars and boats in Southern California were subsequently adopted by artists, and the movement became one of only a few to originate in Southern California. Den Houter’s works recall artists from that period such as Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, and Craig Kaufman.
Looking at the extremely wide variety of artworks that den Houter has produced in his career can seem as if one is seeing the work of several different artists. Because his work is conceptually based, there is no defining style; he approaches each project fresh, beginning with an idea, and the formal appearance of the work follows from that. He has done performances, interventions, and videos, as well as works in drawing, painting, sculpture and photography. But like Chris Burden, who also had no defining “style”, den Houter’s work has a consistency in the myriad kinds of artworks that he has produced which betrays the mind of a conceptualist. The “hard core” Conceptual Art movement was relatively short lived, but it’s influence on Post-Conceptual object makers has been immense. When the concurrent movement of Minimalism took the idea of the formal to the limit, Conceptual Art was a needed influence to get artists to really consider philosophical questions regarding art making. The result of this is today’s kind of conceptually informed, multi-media artist, who makes art in a huge variety of medias and styles and is free to explore an extremely wide variety of approaches; den Houter is a prime example of this kind of 21st century artist.
-David DiMichele
David DiMichele is a Los Angeles based artist, writer and curator.
August 2024