Piet Tuytel

It's all about balance. In every image Piet Tuytel searches for the balance to stay on his feet. His sculptures are the buttresses of his existence. They are made of steel and are immovable in a position that is grounded. You can't get them out of place, although they always give the impression that they could fall on top of you. You must approach them with caution. If you go straight at it, you will be taken down with an outward cut. When he works on his sculptures, Piet Tuytel takes extremely heavy elements in a clasp and lifts them from his legs to move them and bring them into proportion with each other. His knees are no longer worth anything, but he still masters the martial art of making images in his head. His sculptures are trestles, wedges and plinths. They are struts and they form contrasts in hard colors. From the H and T beam he has created an alphabet of images. It is a steel script, a cuneiform script of our time. It sounds something together: weight and weightlessness, mass and void, matter and space, body and soul. His work is as concrete as poetry can be. The images suspend thinking and merge meanings. They form a unity in opposites. With Tuytel, however, the whole is never more than the sum of its parts: they fit together perfectly and when you least expect it, they kick you down. They are images like sweeping legs. After all the lashing and pulling, they elegantly lay you on their back: ippon. Piet Tuytel's sculptures make a point.
Alex de Vries

Bob Bonies

The entire body of work consists of uncompromising groups of rectangular and round pieces of form that are placed, moved, divided, shifted, tilted. Every shape has a colour that is unrelentingly bright. The colours touch one another. There are no lines between them. They are colours without shadows. This is the idiom of Bonies. I see ceaseless energy within clear-cut movements of form and colour. The boundaries of the colour are straight or curved. They originate in the practice of the imagination. Corners are right angles, curves are segments of circles. Bonies’s belief in that morphology is unshakable. They are statements. This book is a compendium of that work. It could go in any direction. It is, in fact, limitless. His art, too, became sturdy and immovable, just like a building. There is actually nothing to be added to those angular assertions, with their straight lines and pure circles. At most, this: the circle is the round form of the square. Straight and round: these are the two great and essential summaries of form. They are unique and irreplaceable. You can use them to express what can scarcely be put into words but can in fact be seen.
            However, years ago, I did venture to present a brief impression to Bob Bonies. The work is broad, I wrote at the time, and precise. It possesses a tough solidity, as if it wishes to be not only art but also, for example, a building. It actually wants to be used, to step outside of art. It wants, in its way, to become reality, not just a dream. That is how the Russians, who inspired it, had envisaged it: large, simple, clear, smoothly tilting planes and colours that remain themselves. Not in competition with nature – or perhaps so?

I will consider an example: how a two-part painting works and is constructed. We read from left to right. That is what we are accustomed to – and it is also how we look at paintings. In, for example, Vermeer’s motionless interiors, the girl playing the leading role within the space is usually turned to the left. The light, too, comes from the left. The daylight falls upon the silent girl, caressing her colour, which begins to light up, as soft as velvet. I see that the actual key in such paintings, in their design, is the way daylight falls into them. Watch patiently and see that delicate light searching and feeling. In this way, figures automatically find their form and colour. I also look at Bob Bonies’s radiantly colourful Dyptiek (Diptych, 1972) from left to right. The visual form is composed of rectangular shapes of clean colour among similar shapes of white. They create a systematic impression. That is the nature of this design. In a painting by Vermeer, the light glides into a visual space that is always poised between light and darkness. The light finds form and illuminates colours from the shadow. Shade with light floating within: that is how these paintings are constructed and how, feeling our way, we look at them.
            In Bonies’s painted work, shapes and colours conspicuously appear without shadow. Mondrian had removed this from art. He and others (such as Van der Leck) had become involved in a new abstract presentation of forms. So a clarification of the repertoire was required. Rectangular shapes, three colours and black lines on white. Mondrian considered that sufficient. Anything more would be confusing. Bonies, too, began from this sort of repertoire. He also went much further. He felt an irresistible need for more visual space in the depiction. Do not forget that almost the entirety of Mondrian’s oeuvre consisted of small paintings. Within that small area, rectangular shapes were placed close together and moved back and forth – as gently and carefully as objects arranged in classical still lifes. The eyes remain very close to the work.
            In comparison to Mondrian’s intimate compositions, Bonies’s Dyptiek appears as spacious and clear as a panorama. At first the eye begins to wander until it starts to discern a schematic pattern in the positioning of the straight-lined shapes and the bold colours. However, the movement between these two panels involves a kind of transposition that is more practical in nature. In the left-hand panel we see an arrangement of four sharply rectangular forms that are also very brightly coloured: red, blue, yellow and green. The green one is, incidentally, a square. The coloured shapes are interrupted by clean areas of white. The pattern of the white planes corresponds to the position of the coloured rectangles in the right-hand panel of the diptych. Each of the four could be moved back to fit one specific area of white. This would result in a left-hand panel filled with complete rectangles of red, blue, yellow and green. The right-hand panel, devoid of colour, would be one large plane of intense white shining, clear and bright, alongside the deeper glow of the four compact blocks of colour. From the vertical red, along the edge on the left, the colours move clockwise towards the green, the most solid of the shapes.
            I imagine that this painting started out as a collage of rectangular shapes. But then, for example, four rectangles of colour were moved from left to right, which is where they ended up. It could also have happened the other way around. This relocation primarily liberated and activated the white in the painting. This then became an intensely individual pattern of very striking white. The richness of Dyptiek is that it is effectively a double painting. It is an ensemble of colours that glow keenly – and all the more clearly because the edges of the rectangles are so sharp. There is not a trace of hazy shadow around those edges. This is the point where the white begins, which gleams so much more brightly because, contrasted with the colours, it appears to become whiter and whiter. I see incredible clarity, which no pen can describe.

Rudi Fuchs