Bas Zoontjens is a voyager in paint. His paintings (not apparent to the viewer) are an enduring dialogue with the canvas onto which he projects questions as well as answers. Impressive in size and scope, they mostly consist of explorations of fantastical, supernatural landscapes.

Answers develop from a necessity to strike a balance between rough, colourful, organic and graphic forms, consistently discovering new forms and histories. Zoontjens presents us with a sincere investigation into a parallel fictional history that includes both the very distant past and the very far future. Inventive forms implode and explode in bright and sometimes sickly flashy colours, forcing us to abandon the familiar and describing instead a world in an aftermath of some huge event: decay has set in but life starts coming back slowly.

In Zoontjens’ paintings the spatial atmosphere is often unspecified and far-reaching. By creating smooth transparent surfaces that contrast with thickly slathered, decadent mounds of shit brown paint, he makes up endless cosmological images and surreal interplanetary vistas which never fail to destabilize our perception of reality.

(Sam L. Rees)