Poetry Suite
The urban landscapes are often pointed observations of our own time and contemporary human behaviour, while his landscapes are characterised by silence and timelessness. However, the works have nothing mundane about them: they carry something universal and enduring, and also often something intangible. ‘Ultimately, I want to say something about themes such as love, desire, life, death, contemplation, the passage of time.Music and the art of others, which I carry with me, also play a role in this,’ says Vermeule.
A special feature of this presentation is the combination with song lyrics; lyrics that the artist has carried with him all his life, words or snippets of phrases that together with his work set the atmosphere in the halls of Museum JAN.
From realism to poetry
Vermeule's motifs range from his family members and street scenes to fleeting landscapes, which he photographs and uses as the basis for his work. Stylistically, Vermeule combines romanticism with realism, abstraction with poetry. His work also testifies to his enthusiasm for the history of painting, music and literature. Cherished artists who always travel with him are Oskar Schlemmer, Georges Seurat and Leon Spilliaert. 'That too influences my work, as do those song lyrics and the images from my proximity.' Using his photographs, sources from art history, preliminary studies and poses from the judo he practices, Vermeule goes to work in his studio to work. ‘I am a builder. He removes the noise from the images, tilts sometimes the perspective, chooses the characters and sometimes lets a colour dominate. His canvases are ultimately crisp and stripped of distracting details, but have their roots in a humus layer of collected images, ideas and personal associations.
Attitude
The characters who populate Vermeule's works are often urban loners in contemporary clothing and hanging around, sitting, lying or walking. They are preoccupied with their phone, camera, or listening to music, temporarily disconnected from their surroundings. They are people you can encounter every day, the anonymous metropolitan citizens. Vermeule is mainly concerned with their posture, not their facial expression, he says. 'Judo has shaped me, its spirituality and aesthetics also determine my attitude, my look.' Both judo and painting involve the same kind of concentration, years of practice and surrender to the movement.
Music
While the works exude peace and quiet, music plays a role in the creative process. Vermeule listens to music in its full breadth, always in search of the unknown, from classical to rocksteady ska. For Poetry Suite, he chose fragments from some twenty songs - by Gabriels, Litte Simz, Talking Heads and Lee Scratch Perry -, to transport the viewer into a theatrical atmosphere. As a frieze the texts form one continuous whole with the works, setting a tone in the spacious and bright museum rooms in Amstelveen. Vermeule takes you into his familiar and at the same time disruptive world, which encourages reflection. Watch and listen: a playlist can also be downloaded via a QR code.
