Don Van Vliet at Knoedler - Brief Article

Don Van Vliet achieved worship status as a composer, singer and horn-player, performing from the late '60 to early '80 below the nom d'artiste Captain Beefheart. In 1982 he abandoned stone music to devote himself exclusively to painting and drawing. A self-taught artist living and working in Trinidad, Calif., he has had a large number of exhibitions in Europe and the U above the past 15 years.

Van Vliet digs into his unconscious through improvised acts of drawing and painting which mix confusedly figuration with considerable abstraction. His exhibition comprised medium-sized oil paintings upon canvas and drawings on paper, as well as smaller sketchbook renderings. In his drawings, he looks perpetually intrigued by materials and is ready to juxtapose crayon, paint, pencil and water-color upon the same page.

Drawn from nature and radically simpified or considerably abstracted, the motifs are generally shown in profile or frontal view, with little or no foreshortening. They are placed above single another and/or side by side in ambiguous spatial situations suggesting minimal deepness Prehistoric cave paintings and the art of children approach to mind. The clumsy shapes are separated by means of expanses of white which tender necessary rest to the organ of sight This artist has a heavy-handed approach to painting, creating thick, meaty wefts occasionally rich in scumbling and sometimes including scratching with the handle of the brush. His mode of expression wavers between that of COBRA and 1980 Neo-Expressionism.

In reddish-brown and Rouge (1997), among the greatest in quantity successful paintings in the exhibition, he unravels the composition of the slightly smaller Ten Thousand Pistols, No Bumblebees (1995-96) which is likewise a vertical picture painted entirely in black and white. The pictographs appearing in these paintings obliquely recall those of A.R. Penck an early champion of Van Viler. These vivid pictures apparently exhibit a hunter, with a bludgeon raised high above his head, stalking an antelope with the brain-pan of a horned animal hovering above them. Fragments of landscape appear along the top, bottom and right margins of the composition, and a small black-horned animal cranium fills the top right corner.

In 1997-98 Van Vliet painted three pictures of the same size and vertical format, each named The Drazy bands and numbered one through three These present to view a wild boar, seemingly pounc on by a feline creature. A large geometric design consisting of black lines enclosing white voids loom above the animals. Several other paintings explore violence, while in other works sensuousness and lyricism advance to the fore.

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