Rudi van de Wint lets you join in on the colors and their shapes

Rudi van de Wint (1942-2006) thought that hanging his paintings in a museum was unimportant. “Hanging next to De Kooning and Stella, is that what it’s all about?”, he said in an interview with Free Netherlands in 1992. He preferred to stay in his own dune area De Nollen near Den Helder, where he could go about his business without compromising with museum decorators or architects. Nevertheless, Van de Wint’s paintings in Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar – his first retrospective ever – make a much greater impression than during a tour of De Nollen.

The exhibition Journey to the Infinite begins with 255 paintings hung close together – ‘painted notes’ – which Van de Wint made between 1970 and 1984. It resembles the color studies of Goethe and Itten, but here there is a strong will to paint from the start. This becomes increasingly clear in later notes: Van de Wint forces his paint with brushes and fingers to create effects, as if all possible color nuances had to be recorded.

Since his birth, Rudi van de Wint has been associated with Den Helder, a city with the sea on three sides. As a boy, he often went to the dunes with his father to watch sunsets. This fascination for the dynamic beauty of color and form characterizes his work. Van de Wint is known for his enormous paintings that have been the background of all debates in the House of Representatives since 1992 (only now due to the renovation). The image is also known The tongue on the Knardijk along the A6 in Flevoland (not at the moment due to a major repair after storm damage).

Cosmic Powers

Much of his work can be found in De Nollen, which is now managed by his two sons, where he stayed almost constantly from 1980 until his death. There he indulged in uncompromising and large sculptures and paintings that often became one with the spaces he built especially for them.

At De Nollen he put skylights on old bunkers so that the light fell where he wanted, painted walls and ceilings, dug ponds and underground passages. The same groping vigor can be found in his sculptures and constructions, in which, just like in the paintings, something of the infinite power and variation of nature and the world manifests itself. Funnel-shaped buildings seem to be passive receptors of cosmic forces, sculptures gently sway with the wind like huge sansevierias. His oval sculptures are often made precisely to defy the elements – although that went wrong on the Knardijk.

Van de Wint’s sculptures are large and are therefore missing from the exhibition. This lacuna has been solved excellently by showing a test model or miniature version of twelve works.

Noordeinde Palace

What you can easily pass by in Alkmaar is the study to scale for the magnificent ceiling painting he made in 1983 for a stairwell in Queen Beatrix’s working palace Noordeinde (can be visited on Google Street View† You happen to have to look straight up at the exhibition if you want to discover that inverted ‘bathtub’ (1.84 by 1.24 meters and 0.62 meters deep) on the exhibition. Van de Wint worked upwards from the sides with increasingly lighter colours. It gives the same trompe-l’oeil effect as traditional ceiling paintings, except that this sky is not an image of reality but an abstract invitation to meditate. Van de Wint lets you sway with the colors and their shapes and just like with Mark Rothko you can look without thinking or giving meaning. Everything has been forgotten for a while.

The effect of the two large paintings (both 1987) from the ten-volume Eyeseries, five of which hang in the Chamber, is even more overwhelming. Standing in front of it is like being part of a sunset, where orange, purple, brown, blue and white light swirls and becomes still.

The fact that his painting comes into its own here in the exhibition is because the nature of De Nollen distracts attention and especially because in Van de Wint’s exhibition buildings the murals quickly take on something lavish. But his outdoor sculptures glory there.