Featuring nearly fifty paintings and drawings created over forty-three years – rendered in ink, watercolor and gouache – this retrospective of the art of Philip Van Aver features works that act as subtle yet poetic talismans. powerful. Serene landscapes, dreamlike tableaux and refined still lifes whisper visions of imaginary worlds: Van Aver’s own Arcadia.
The exhibition reveals a striking coherence: the most recent work on display, made in 2021, is similar in style and subject to pieces made in the late 1970s. Van Aver’s delicate images are typically the size of a handkerchief or a postcard – the artist is an avid collector of the latter – but look even smaller in their extremely elaborate illustrated frames. They often present mythological or fantasized scenes intertwined with mundane events, which sometimes serve as the backdrop for erotic, exotic or mysterious encounters. A magnificent cavalcade of beings, objects and settings appear in Van Aver’s paintings, including statues, gardens, caves and groves; fully clothed women and naked men; pose salamanders, a parrot and a turtle; flowers, beads and decorated boxes; and legendary creatures such as the goddess Ariadne, the god Pan, and a dancing pearl-bodied dwarf.
Perhaps the works function as personal stations of the cross to the artist’s own mythology. These melancholic scenes are also reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts, with their stylized perspectives and their palette of jewels. They invite us to fill in the chapters and make our own narrative underlying these bucolic and sumptuous images, somewhere between a Shakespearean play and a gay cruise. Van Aver’s meticulous techniques are reminiscent of those used by monks in the Middle Ages, when rigorous, delicate, and painstaking practice paved the way for spiritual revelation. Is Van Aver the sender or the recipient of these imaginary postcards? Probably both, only we can intercept them.
