Outside the Gate

Solo show at Everyday Gallery, Antwerp, 2022

The painterly work of Dittmar Viane is significantly influenced by the Early Netherlandish painting from the 15-16th century. Painters like Dirk Bouts (1415-475) and Hans Memling (1430-1494) employed distinctive drawing techniques like linear perspective to create a uniquely realist but slightly estranging feel; and being one of the first generation of painters to work with oil paint they developed subtle painterly techniques for chromatic glazing that, combined with the subdued hues of their colors, created an eerie luminescence in their paintings.

Dittmar Viane studied graphic arts and illustration at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. Having first honed his drawing skills, he turned to oil painting in the final years of his education. Like the Early Netherlandish painters, Viane now works almost exclusively with oil paint and a series of fine brushes. This combination allows him to apply the extremely subtle transitions and details and the glazing technique that gives the works a transparent and lifelike shine. Making its colors slightly darker through the addition of minimal amounts of black paint, he is able to counter the overly brightening effect and visual depth that a glazing can achieve; and at the same time, it binds the colors in his work together.

Viane creates a representation of reality that feels uncannily realistic in its pictorial detail, but is full of visual paradoxes and subtle irony. The use of a strangely deformed perspective, for example, allows him to combine a depiction the full frontal and side view of the objects in his paintings. This explains the estranging effect of An Angel’s Nest (2022) and Trestle of Trestles (2022), where we see the birdhouse and the trestles from angles that would normally exclude each other. Combined with the highly realistic depiction of the wood and the gradient skies, these paintings become the setting for subtly unsettling situations.

Text by Bram Ieven