A black cable with a plug floats in a pool of sky-blue color – that's what you think you can see at first glance.
Then the view falls on a truncated facade on the left, it is a hotel that is reflected in a puddle just like the street lamp whose pole ripples in the water to form a wavy line.
The vertical format does not hang overhead, as the first impression suggests, a dark pen on the upper edge of the picture is a bollard, which is also given as a reflection.
Once these irritations have been clarified, one can devote oneself to the nuanced blue that dominates the picture, in its transitions from bright light to dull darkness: the color zones are layered in a similar way to a Rothko - for example, the picture entitled " Hot” by Koen van den Broek from last year.
All of the painter's works in his eighth exhibition at Cologne's Philipp von Rosen gallery are based on photographs taken by the Belgian, who was born in 1973, while travelling.
The title of the show "Tango in Paris" (prices 29,500 to 58,000 euros) indicates the place where most of these works were created: His first trip after the outbreak of the pandemic had taken him to the French capital.
This is the painter's "place of longing", writes the gallery owner in the accompanying booklet.
From the very beginning, van den Broek preferred to point the camera downwards, looking at pavements, curbs, the street, discovering the image composition for his painting in ephemeral things and in the sections in which he caught sight of them.
His sixth sense for the benefits of the limited field of vision connects van den Broek's oeuvre with the works of his fellow Belgian painters Bert de Beul and Raoul De Keyser, although he has adopted an even more casual style in his most recent works - as in "Water #3" from 2021 , in which the puddle forms in fluffy brushstrokes.
Rarely does the space open up in depth.
In one of the rare works (“Pantin #3”) with a conventional pictorial space, one senses a road and a car parked on the shoulder in front of the setting sun, while the camera eye gave the painter-photographer a beguiling refraction of light, which he courageously exploited and with strong colors in the image sets.
Van den Broek demonstrates the peculiarities of the camera view with two pictures that were taken somewhere out in the country and hang next to each other like twins: Both show the same parking lot with tractor and pick-up, but painted in contrasting light-dark contrasts - "Off ' and 'On', the titles refer to the setting of the flashlight.
A red interior with the cables of a lamp that dangles from above and triggers dark associations of the underworld and crime scene appears unusually symbolic.
Koen van den Broek, "Tango in Paris", Philipp von Rosen Galerie, Cologne, until March 26th