Dreamcatcher (2013)
5 OIL PAINTINGS
Dreamcatcher brings together five paintings by Koen Van den Broek that were created in the decade before Museum to Scale. In Happiness (2006), a row of trees casts a shadow over a road surface. The trees themselves remain out of view, as does what is happening at the top beyond the edge of the road. In Broken Yellow Border (2003), the viewer's gaze is explicitly directed by a yellow curb, which angles just before the end of the canvas. The perspective line is reduced to an independent pictorial element, an almost abstract plane of color that spatially defines and demarcates the image. The central painting, from which the title Dreamcatcher is derived, dates from 2011. In 2016-2017 it served as the poster image for The Nutcracker, a production by Ballet Flanders as part of the seasonal theme “Borderline,” for which Van den Broek provided all the images. Van den Broek's formal and thematic focus on boundaries, shadows and details difficult to trace back to their origins is in keeping with E.T.A. Hoffmann's original novella. It balances on the tipping point between dream and reality, leaving room for the shadow side of the human psyche in addition to childlike imagination.