René Eicke || november 2016 ||

I was born in Essen, Germany. From 1975 to 1977 I was studying art at the Fachoberschule for Gestaltung in Essen. In 1977 I changed and started a new life in Utrecht the Netherlands. From 1977 to 1983 I was studying Visual Arts at the Academie in Utrecht. During my studie I was painting thousands of portraits. I worked to abstraction to, that finally was ending in formlessness. After my study I started working abstract.

I think all the years that were following I was looking for new possibilities how to paint. There came endings and new beginnings in my work in my life. Three years ago painting stopped. Colour disappeared.
Now I am drawing on canvas. I am drawing on canvas with black. I call it painting. I love it.

I work with a more or less visible, perceptible, tangible system and a more or less visible, perceptible, tangible deviation. This causes a more or less unrest. The unsharpness plays  a large roll in my work. To understand in a form of vagueness, uncertainty and incertitude. I make space for the error in the system.

I’m interested in opposites as the planned and the accidental, the directional and non-directional, the predictable and the unpredictable. A question in this case is how come the secure and the unsecure together.

Is unity possible. I use the grid as a regulatory system. A structure through which the accurate and inaccurate can be visible. Small changes and displacements can here give rise to a new identity.

I work with the repetition of form whereby patterns are formed but also intensities and powers of the individual and different forms, which constantly appear of disappear. Repeat means in my work to make a difference. Repetition exists on the basis of the intensity of the various.

And than there is of course still the action. Action not as statement of sentiments but more than sign. Action in this case is connected with the close. Action seems to interrupt something, come out somewhere and plunge into the surface of the painting. The action seems to emerge from the personal world of thoughts, and then, between past and future, visibly set on the canvas.