Paul Drissen, Ama
Slewe Gallery will open the new season on Saturday, September 5, with a solo exhibition by Paul Drissen titled Ama (Latin for 'love'), featuring a new series of paintings.
These new works grew out of a long-standing fascination with Henri Matisse’s early oeuvre—specifically the paintings he created between 1904 and 1918. During this period, Matisse sought greater freedom regarding color and space, while his motifs—a studio, a window, a garden, flowers, or a model—remained present. What appeals to Drissen in these works is the tension between holding on and letting go. Matisse seems to break his motifs open further and further: walls become transparent, figures dissolve into their surroundings, and space loses its fixed order. This attitude forms the starting point for Ama.
Drissen’s recent paintings allude to familiar motifs such as flowers, vases, tables, and landscapes, yet never as unambiguous depictions. Fragments of forms and meanings are shifted, repeated, and reassembled. A detail may evolve into an image, a form transform into a brushstroke, or a motif vanish only to reappear elsewhere. For Drissen, a painting does not contain an image; it sets an image in motion. The works unfold in the space between recognition and looking. Foreground and background constantly swap roles, and what initially appears recognizable turns out, upon closer inspection, to be a temporary constellation of color, rhythm, and paint. With Ama, Drissen connects his own painting practice with motifs and stylistic devices from art history. The series is both a reflection on the art of painting and an attempt to reconnect its traditions with life, memory, and love.
Drissen lives and works in Maastricht. After studying at Ateliers 63 in Haarlem, now De Ateliers in Amsterdam, he exhibited three times at art & project in Rotterdam and Slootdorp between 1991 and 1997 and at Greta Meert in Brussels (1996). In the same year he had a solo with paintings and drawings in the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht and in 2005 his first museum overview in the Stadsgalerij Heerlen, now Schunck, under the title Melodernia. In 2024 he had a solo exhibition, titled Short Cuts at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, accompanied by a catalogue of the same name.
His work is included in important public collections such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum The Hague, Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, Schunck Heerlen, Kröller Müller Museum, Otterlo, as well as art collections of DSM, NOG, ABN AMRO and Akzo Nobel Art Foundation. Since 1999, Drissen has exhibited regularly at Slewe Gallery in Amsterdam.