Ilse dhollander

Ilse D’Hollander

Ilse D’Hollander

Works on Paper Works on Paper

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Ilse D’Hollander: An Oeuvre Replete with Paradox The story is the paint, the paint tells a story Eric Rinckhout

‘Loneliness is a house’ – Hugo Claus While she chose to leave this world at the relatively young age of 29, Ilse D’Hollander had created an oeuvre that exudes enormous personality and possesses an equal measure of maturity. She painted intensively— almost obsessively—between 1995 and the beginning of 1997. In the space of three short years it took to evolve, she managed to construct an extensive and consistent oeuvre that is as solid as a house.

The word ‘house’—together with ‘paint’—might well be a keyword in her work; the house in Paulatem in the municipality of Zwalm in East Flanders where she threw herself time and again into her work after an exhausting walk, exploring nature; the house with its corners, walls, wallpaper, rooms and sparse furniture that played a prominent role in her paintings, no matter how abstract its portrayal. And perhaps her paintings themselves—mostly flat and shallow, sometimes strikingly three-dimensional—were a house for her? I’ll return to that question later.

Ilse D’Hollander (1968–1997) is often bracketed together with Raoul De Keyser (1930–2012). This is correct to some extent, although there are some clear differences between both painters and D’Hollander had other influences.

Ilse D’Hollander and Raoul De Keyser knew each other well. They first met at a contemporary music concert in Ghent and a sort of telepathic contact was immediately established between them. De Keyser was almost forty years older than D’Hollander, but they became kindred souls nevertheless.

In the years in which they knew each another, De Keyser’s work went far beyond the figurative-abstract divide. He worked exclusively with paint, creating works of pictorial chamber music, and it is here that we can observe points of convergence with the work of D’Hollander.

But De Keyser worked slowly and painted with deliberation. He loved irony: in the work itself and in the tension he created between the title and the painting. Deliberation and irony are not what immediately come to mind when I think of Ilse D’Hollander. She worked at speed, constantly training her hand and achieving thereby breathtaking quality and virtuosity. She thought in paint and lived in paint. She painted out of dire necessity; it brought order to her life.

But as I observed above, numerous painters influenced her work. She inherited from Cézanne the ability to translate reality into geometry. Nicolas de Staël was also important because he found inspiration, after an abstract period, in recognisable reality and consigned it to canvas in a largely abstract form. This may have served as a guiding principle for Ilse D’Hollander when she herself sought to escape her wildly abstract experiments from the early 1990s. But her work does not exhibit the ambition and epic gesture of De Staël.

There are other points of reference in her development, however. Sometimes a composition or a motif is reminiscent of an abstract Léon Spilliaert, and Roger Raveel is similarly recognisable in the geometrical tension between rectangle and square: fences and posts in a partitioned Flemish landscape.

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