Commentary
“Haunted by history” are the words that could be spoken truly, almost anywhere, at anytime. Every place and every era is stalked by the phantoms of its own unsettled past, who keep reminding the living of the debt of memory they owe to the dead.
For Henk Pander, to be haunted by history is both a personal and artistic condition. It is the unavoidable consequence of a childhood growing up in wartime in the Netherlands, with its terrors and deprivations. This experience gave him both the subject of some of his most powerful work, and way to look at the world. That perspective sees the world in extremis, both existentially and politically. The crisis is continual and kaleidoscopic in its manifestations. Ecological ruin, militarism, violence, and terrorism appear like the signs of the Apocalypse for our age. In other words, history is now, and Pander asks us to bear witness, as he has borne witness to his personal story.
To be haunted by the past is to be left exquisitely sensitive to the vulnerability of the human condition. This can translate into cynicism or worse, an aesthetics of suffering. But for Pander, the exposure to the atrocious has left him a humanist, with the ability to look directly at life lived all around him. He sees the hubris of the American industrial empire in a vast desert airplane graveyard. He records the workaday tragedies of an EMS squad as it tries to revive a dying man. And he sensitively renders in a still life, a remembrance of his father, a painter and his first teacher.
But in Pander’s paintings is a spirit that goes beyond empathy. There is a kind of hyped-up, over the top exuberance that gives his work its particular charge. There is the mordant humor that pervades his canvases, the unmistakable laughter at the edge of the abyss. Not just gallows humor, this is the by-product of a satirical sensibility which sees its responsibility to wake us up by any means necessary. Surreal in its fevered imagination, the works are dreaming of the present and recent past, and seeing lurid visions that have the tang of the real. The end of wild nature becomes a kind of farcical marionette theater, with real skeletons dancing for our pleasure. While a derelict freighter, about to foul the shore with its fuel, becomes the ghost ship of our nightmares.
In a sense, Pander is a history painter, infused with the genre’s tradition of cinematic grandeur. But attuned to the particular sense of loss that is the haunting of our history, he paints his scenes with a knowing, astringent splendor.
– John Mendelsohn
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