Free jam-painting:
a pictorial dialogue by BenFo
In 2006 Ben Vollers and Fons Heijnsbroek started to paint together under the name Benfo. It meant for them painting on the same spot, same moment, on the same canvas. No escape for a dialogue in paint.
What started as a one-stand afternoon-performance grew out into a rather unusual but intense dialogue-in-paint between these two Dutch abstract painters. They already knew each other for 15 years very well; they discussed their personal art frequently and had many expositions together. 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 piece of art which stands. Yet they 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.
Vollers and Heijnsbroek paint both abstract and expressive on their own, and both like to use their spontaneous visual impulses taking shape into the painting. This is the basic ground in their cooperation. Both love abstract expressionistic painting and they discuss a lot the work of former painters who gave shape to this area of painting. Both artists also share their love for the city Amsterdam, the old city, as well as the modern visual dynamic. And perhaps it is not by chance that both love strongly jazz: it is the music which is created spontaneously in improvisation.
Both artists want to incorporate in their art the unknown, the not preconceived, the not predictable. There lies the significance of the other, what one means to the other during the common painting. 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 the ‘other one’, who is allowed to change the whole painting, if he ‘sees’ it necessary. Heijnsbroek and Vollers accept that they need the other so strongly to disturb himself, to be able to make something New and unexpected. So they 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 only getting a definite visible face when both artists agree: this painting is finished.
In Avallon (Bourgogne, France) the two artists showed a selection of 25 paintings they made together during the last two years. That was 50 % of of the exposition in the St Pierre church in Avallon. The other part of this exposition was that the two artists painted together in their church-studio, during this exposition. They painted together a collection of new paintings, with as ‘motif’ the river Le Cousin, and its borders along the old city Avallon. Because of this theme they experienced themselves in a broader tradition, as Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell who were abstract-expressionist but nevertheless very strongly fascinated by the Water lilies of Monet, so they too came to France to paint.
Ben and Fons are Dutch painters and very familiar with the Dutch humid atmosphere and natural light. The river Le cousin gave them a double landscape because its water reflects the borders and the overhanging trees. It was a challenge for them to catch the atmosphere around the river Le Cousin and all its reflecting images of trees and rocks, in their spontaneous made paintings.
Jean Homacher