Gallerie Van Gelder show. ‘Tell me when to stop, ok?’ 2020

review of the show (http://www.lost-painters.nl/galerie-van-gelder-henry-byrne-tell-me-when-to-stop-ok/)

Room 1

Since I've been working on a panel, it rarely happens to me that I have to throw away my work. Not that no work fails anymore, if it fails I simply grab the sander until I see the white gesso looming again. When working on canvas, this is a lot more difficult. Once the paint has dried, it is almost impossible to remove. Many other painters, for example, often end up with meters of linen and cotton in the trash. Isn't there a way to still do something with those works?

Perhaps Henry Byrne (1985) saw work disappear into the container with his colleagues. Or the canvases kept swinging blankly through the studio. He took the works, brushed a thin coat of paint over them, and scratched text into them. It is no longer the work that has been in limbo for so long, but becomes Byrne's work. This will of course have been done in consultation with the original maker, because the quotes that eventually ended up on the canvases arise from the conversations that went back and forth.

The works thus reveal themselves not so much as paintings, but as how artists relate to each other as human beings. Here, a network of artist friends around Byrne unfolds. The conversations he must have had with that, that's the real work. As an outsider, we only catch a glimpse of it through the canvases that eventually hang in the gallery.

Room 2

‘Fantasy island’ shows an abstract map painted to resemble an engraving with another paiting that has the shape of a postcard. In the middle of the floor is a white island. the painted inflatable island resembles a sculpture, the whiteness gives it a sculptural quality. The work seems to be a comment on the appropriation of the island. Here another place is presented as what is underneath or what has masked the properties of such spaces. There seems another kind of appropriation by masking and translating the symbols with paint by painting the island adding or taking away with the relief paintings.