Industrial and Cultural Heritage

Herbert Hermans

The main theme of this exhibition is industrial and cultural heritage. Sources of inspiration for these oil paintings are abandoned and often ruinous buildings. Herbert often records these buildings before demolition by photographs and sketches. Use of colour and use of light make these paintings special events. Dark disconsolateness is changing into light and warmth. Regularly characters are added into the paintings who give another or an extra dimension to the images. The tension in their relationship is sometimes nearly tangible. Herbert is fascinated by perspectives, precision and colour to create in an eclectic way a strange environment for people in these historical and often ruinous buildings. His work is inspired by the paintings of famous artists like M.C. Esscher, Carel Willink and Edward Hopper. His style is realistic, but he likes to avoid photorealism. Despite the images’ realism they maintain an air of fantasy. The paintings are immersed in a sometimes surreal aura that highlights the ‘incredible’. At the same time with the narrative content he hopes to take the viewer on a socially critical journey and make him or her aware of new perspectives on reality and illusions of reality. His paintings develop through observation and are rather a response to the places that he has visited in real life. As a result his work parallels multiple layers of perception. He enjoys the investigation that is needed to figure out just what it is you are looking at. By transforming what seems to be real, he hopes to reveal the complex and mysterious dimensions of reality. When the perspective of the viewer shifts or gets distorted by his paintings, new understandings of reality become possible.