The nightingales (2013)
OIL ON CANVAS
The nightingale is the poet among birds and Fik Van Gestel the poet among painters. This work evokes, as it were, synesthesia: a moment in which the powers of perception on the basis of color and sound go wild associatively. The artist invites the viewer to take a seat on the bench in the middle of the museum gallery to lose himself, like a romantic, in the desolate beauty of the frozen winter trees. It is not entirely clear what the white patches here and there symbolize. Is it the first or last snow falling? Or are they the nightingales whose songs announce the imminent spring and reawaken the potential of love in the viewer?