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a Painter´s duo in Dialogue
Benfo-Dutch


In 2006 we, Ben Vollers and Fons Heijnsbroek, started to paint together. Same spot, same moment, together painting on the same canvas.  What started as a one-stand afternoon-performance grew out into a rather unusual but intense dialogue-in-paint between us, two Dutch abstract painters. We already knew each other for 15 years very well; discussed our personal art frequently and we had many expositions together since then. But painting together is another kind of thing; it is a very unusual and strange thing to fuse two individual forces and pretend to make so a one piece of art that stands. Yet we started this adventure and during 2007-2009 they painted 30 big paintings together, meanwhile developing a lot of mutual confidence and freedom during the common painting practice.


We paint both abstract and expressive on our own, and we both like to use our spontaneous visual impulses taking shape into the painting. This is the basic ground in our cooperation. We both love abstract expressionistic painting and discuss a lot the work of former painters who gave shape to this fascinating area of painting. We also share our love for the city Amsterdam, the old city, as well as the modern visual dynamic. And perhaps it is not by chance that we both love strongly jazz: it is the music which is also created spontaneously in improvisation.

We want to incorporate in our art the unknown, the not preconceived, the not predictable. There lies the significance of working togehther like jamming in paint; one is unpredictable for the other during the common painting-act. In a mutual sense one means the unknown for the other. Every moment in the painting process the development of the painting is uncertain because of this ‘other one’, this 'not-me', who is allowed to change the whole painting, if he ‘sees’ it necessary. We accept that we need the other so strongly to disturb ourself, to be able to make something New and unexpected. Sowe are dependent on each other, where painting itself is the language-in-images to communicate: to ask for or to define, to make statements or withdraw them, to argue, to destroy or to affirm. The so developed image is just getting a definite visible face when we both on a certain moment agree, the painting is finished.

In Avallon, Bourgogne, France we showed during April and May 2009 a selection of 25 paintings we made together during the last three years. But that was only 50 % of of the exposition!. The other half was that we painted together in and during this exposition, in public. We painted together a collection of 15 new paintings, with as ‘motif’ the river Le Cousin, and its borders. We experienced ourselves painting in a much broader and older tradition, as Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell did in the 1950's; they also did abstract-expressionist painting, but nevertheless they were very much fascinated by the Water lilies of Monet, so they came to France themselves to experience the flowerrs and the paintings in the flesh.

We are Dutch painters and so we very familiar with the Dutch humid atmosphere and natural light. The river Le Cousin gave us a double landscape, because its water reflects the borders and the overhanging trees. We walked a lot along its border and every second the murmurring sound of the water reached out ears. This was probably the most profound impression we got of her, the sound of a living perpetum mobili, an always going energy with no goal, just a direction. The lasst sic paintings we made there in Avallon have nothing naturalistic, not even in the mutual color relations. It´s only the energy and its rhytms what is under the paintings. 

Fons Heijnsbroek