Don van Vliet
"The Corn Thief"

1988
Oil on canvas, 58" x 48", framed, Inv-No VLI 79/A

"Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh", Artist Ink Editions, Los Angeles 2003:

… "The Corn Thief" (1988) is again marked by evocations of Chenese painting. There is a palimpsest of calligraphy in the middle centre. As in a Chinese painting, these marks establish a surface which then floats before us, like marks made on a window through we're looking. However, the blobs and scrapes of oil paint have a substantial quality which is the opposite of Chinese painting's watery world. In a gesture that utterly separates him from the hippies. Van Vliet wants to lift our perception of the material world into the global actuality, not deny it in favour of idealised dreams. Below the oriental characters, an ominous grey mushroom cloud reminds the viewer of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, crimes committed by the west against the east. Brown, yellow nd red paint streaks are the anamate part of the painting. They function like goldfish in a japanese study of a lily pond, providing movement and life, but again Van Vliet is not pursuing some orientalist evasion of history. The brown creature - whose grey shadow evokes both the lower atomic cloud and some bounding dinosaur - appears to be in a desperate hurry, perhaps fleeing forest fire or hunters. The black, semi-calligraphic marks become like those on a rough wall which invite hallucogenic projection from tired eyes. The marks might suddenly resolve into a picture of a homestead, scaffolding for a church, a grain elevator or an approaching locomotive (Van Vliet's ability to suggest human constructions in flickering, ambiguous paint recalls Oskar Kokoschka). Perhaps the grey shapes on the left portray a burning church, and the "grey dinosaur" is smoke pouring into the sky. There is something akin to an old-fashioned film-poster in the way the picture superimposes fragments of a possible story. However, nothing is allowed to settle into an unambiguours image, and finally what one enjoys is the way all colors and shapes are kept moving around the patch of creamy off-white just below the centre. (Text by Ben Watson)

Exhibitions:

"Don van Vliet - Neue Bilder" Galerie Michael Werner, Köln 1990

"Don van Vliet" San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco 1989

Catalogues:

"Don van Vliet - Neue Bilder" Galerie Michael Werner, Köln 1990

"Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh" Artist Ink Editions, Los Angeles 2003, page 23

Artpapers:

ARTFORUM, April 1989, page 171

MODERN PAINTERS, Winter 2000, page 43