Reviews
“Colour in Krabbé remains strong and clear, the point thick, the surface rich, the effect at times to make Holland seem as exotic as Cambodia – which no doubt at times it is. But while the actual statement, too, remains as open on the surface as it always was, the touch by contrast has grown softer, calmer, more subtle and reflective. The painterly gesture is less obvious, too, less sweeping and expansive, while the interest in pattern is now less an interest in itself than a function of the landscape it in part describes.”
William Packer
The Financial Times
“Krabbé’s landscapes convey an entirely convincing sense not only of place but also season and climate. They do so not by itemizing the particular in an accumulation of closely scrutinised details but, exploring the narrow border between abstraction and figuration, they rather distil from what has been seen, experienced and then sharply recalled, the concentrated essence of physical features, atmosphere and mood.”
Frank Whitford
The Sunday Times
Reviews
“Painting in recent decades has often taken the form of dry reduction to the bare minimum. A few stripes, a simple contrast of colour, perhaps the ultimate sobriety of all-white, or all-black canvases. This trend established, in the minimalist movement of the ’60s, what one might call a norm of visual under nourishment. Clearly, however, such austerities are not for the Dutch artist Jeroen Krabbé – who began his training as a painter precisely in the ’60s, and returned to art in the even drabber ’70s.
Krabbé is a man for all seasons, pigment and climates. His Malaysian landscapes are filled with the supersaturated hues of the tropics – Madonna blue, gold, scarlet. These are pictures made up, very frequently, of big, simple stretches of colour – dark seas, burnished skies – set against whriting, spikey vegetation. the results put one in mind of brocade, or oriental metal work. At the same time, as is common in his work, the pictures come very close to complete abstraction while remaining quite definitely landscapes – and highly exuberant, accessible ones, at that.”
Martin Gayford
The Daily Telegraph