Catalogue, Gran Finale di Biennale di arte visive a Roma 2014, Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori, ISBN 978-88-6052-580-2, p.53 Text (translation)
Lucas van Eeghen
“We are within nature; should our inception, our origins be sought elsewhere? We live in nature, with nature, of nature, and we would still not be derived from it? What a contradiction!” Ludwig Feuerbach
That mankind and nature are in many ways related speaks for itself. Much less evident is in what form and directions the two relate – for both mankind and his environment are a complex system whose fundamental characteristics constantly mutate. In the history of art, at least according to the classical aesthetics, the imitation of nature is considered to be the basis of artistic creation. For thousands of years, there was a solidarity between beauty in arts and beauty in nature – a doctrine dating back to Plato. The ‘Ars imitatur naturam’ of Aristotle postulated that art was not only the result of a complex process of imitation of nature, but also of the ability to subject nature (since thinking beings were considered tob e superior in imitating nature than beings that can only feel), or an encouragement to push the boundaries of human knowledge. In the eighteenth century Kant, in his Kritik des reines Vernunft, is perhaps the last thinker of modern times for whom the beauty of a flower outweighed the beauty of a painting. For him art is based no longer on imitation, but it is regarded as the ingenious creation of the artist, although he still assumes a strong connection between art and nature: “… the human talent is the innate disposition of the soul with which nature sets rules to art.”
In that perspective fits the artistic talent of the Dutchman Lucas van Eeghen, who with his recent 3D paintings in mixed media skillfully explores the relationship between mankind and nature, and prompts us to not consider them as separate concepts. He does this by encouraging our right to think in an open debate on the question, “does the contemporary man feel to be inextricably linked to nature?” Examples are the works Field of Hope (from 2012) and Field of Love (from 2013), in which the mixture of natural and artificial elements produce extrordinairy effects in a three dimensional, colorful and communicative environment. In his 3D work Van Eeghen uses true leaves and stems, which he petrifies in his very own technique using industrial paints in shades of green, red or blue. He transforms the canvas from a simple support into a meaningful dimension of the visual image, and in that process he uses compositional effects that are close to reality but ultimately illusory, in order to express the artificial finishing touch to natural forms.
The nature of our time shows the fading boundaries between nature – as what used to ordaine this world in absolute terms – and the artificial. The “divine” order of the world has been destroyed or lost – there is no longer a nature that should be respected – and thus not only disappears the distinction between nature and the artifice, but everything is in principle feasible and artificial. In the inspiration of Van Eeghen an implicit warning is hidden: todays life with the the continuous progress of science and technology may deprive mankind of its naturalness and nature. Van Eeghen wants to recall with his “paintersculptures” how the leaves had a life of their own, before they were crystallised by him, embalmed, as it were, in their own plastic.
And in such a hectic life, in which the speed dictates our time, in which technological progress dominates everything, we easily forget the future dimension of our existence. We have to stop and meditate on the purpose of our own essence. The work Stop the time (from 2011) testifies of this: a bust of a man firmly put in a plaster without any space and time dimension, with a lot of newspapers as a sort of headgear, as if he was fixed in our own stories of everyday life. Van Eeghens art thus seems to want to freeze the presumption of a better future in it own way ,difficult for now, but conceivable as a hope for our millennium, both confrontational and essential.
Lucas van Eeghen 