There are artists who capture the world in fragments as a collection of separate scenes held together only by a coincidental convergence of time and space. And then there are artists who, like cartographers of the uncertain, layer memory and imagination until a reality emerges that is both distorted and startlingly recognisable. To me, Bas Coenegracht belongs in the latter category. His paintings are not merely visual compositions, but carriers of an inner movement, a continuous oscillation between appearance and disappearance, between materiality and dream...
In the exhibition 'I Have More Souls Than One' (Uitstalling Art Gallery in MAD Gallery in Poland), Coenegracht explores the multiplicity of the self. His figures oscillate between realism and abstraction, between dream images and documentary remnants. They appear in vividly coloured environments that are as much mental landscapes as physical places. This is neither static art nor fixed anecdote, but a continuous movement — like humanity itself, like memory that never stands still.
This article was published earlier on Gallery Viewer. You can read the full story here.