About Rik Daems

Rik Daems's painting style, at least compared to the traditional approach, is anything but orthodox. Instead of placing the canvas on an easel, he lays it flat on the floor. Instead of using a brush, brush, and smear, he prefers to pour paint directly onto the canvas (American Pollock, who became famous for this, called this the "Dripping" method). Rather than attempting to graphically represent the purely visual appearance of people and objects, he probes the inner self and chooses to give it a completely subjectively interpreted "image" (which is, after all, the most valid way to create a portrait of someone or something). Rik Daems is not interested in producing images or imitations, depictions, or even imaginations. Outlines, figures, or objects are of no use to him. He attacks the colors directly, not to subdue or overpower them, but to make them co-responsible and accomplices. He allows them to run free, but orchestrates their autonomous urge to run wild, their tendency to merge, their urge to overflow. He ensures that yellow, red, and blue remain strictly pure and wholesome. They may flow through and over each other, but not into each other! Like bright, shining, congealed lava plays, they meander across the canvas, stretching or seething, in strokes or strings, in peaks or curls. But the master's hand reins in the orientation of certain movements, bringing more tranquility to some areas—affections, memories, reflections, and stray thoughts.

But within this completely abstract landscape, composed of flowing dots and stripes, highly concrete everyday objects are unexpectedly and paradoxically directly incorporated and inserted: a tennis racket, the remains of a discarded computer, old paintbrushes and the lids of cans or boxes… A worn yet reminiscent reality thus penetrates and is integrated into a totally non-figurative world through the overflow of paint. A bond is created between these everyday objects, about to be discarded, which suddenly acquire a new existence, halfway between their true yet discarded identity and a poetic, purely plastic presence.