In Dutch Golden Age still-life painting, it’s not uncommon to be treated to tables laden with flowers and food such as fruits, game, and fish. These works were painstakingly rendered; one can practically smell the sea. But the flip side is the temporality of these items, as the painting preserves their freshness, but we know they will ultimately decay. This incorporation of memento mori was intentional, as the inevitability of death was something people meditated carefully on.
Flora and fauna in Dutch painting also demonstrate abundance and diversity, from myriad types of foods to hyperrealistic flower arrangements, such as those of Rachel Ruysch, that may have had folkloric hidden meanings. For artist Veks Van Hillik, tropes from these canvases find their way into surreal, eccentric paintings and murals that also nod contemporary concerns and humanity’s relationship to the natural world.
“There is also something almost systematic in the way humans tend to personify animals and project a certain form of anthropomorphism onto the stories we tell about them,” Van Hillik tells Colossal. “I enjoy playing with these unspoken codes inherited from fables and folk tales. And, whether intentionally or not, an ecological subtext—or at the very least a reflection on our ecosystems—often emerges in my work, something I like to preserve and contemplate.”
Fish emerged rather enigmatically as a central focus on Van Hillik’s work, partly because they were among the very first things he learned to draw as a child, when one of his older brothers taught him. “But the marine and aquatic world also offers an almost endless variety of forms, colors, and patterns,” he says. “Sometimes graceful, sometimes monstrous or grotesque, fish are almost always somewhat surreal.”
In his large-scale murals, and also increasingly in the studio, Van Hillik nods to the tones and settings of historical still life paintings, including sturdy surfaces, dark backgrounds, and architectural niches. Spilling from these are objects and animals we instantly recognize, such as birds, plants, and insects. But first impressions may be misleading, as upon closer inspection, a butterfly is missing its body, a nautilus balances on a bubble, and a heron’s beak transforms into a key.
Van Hillik is interested in weight and presence along with unusual relationships and hybrid creatures. Fish, in particular, are the kind of thing we eat regularly, and some of us may even cast a line for them from time to time, but they live in a world entirely different from ours. The earth’s aquatic expanses comprise a realm we are far from fully understanding; we’ve only mapped a little over a quarter of the entire sea floor, for example, and we really have no idea how many marine species there really are.
Along with what Van Hillik describes as their fascinating “peculiar sense of levitation,” fish are among some of his favorite animals to portray, representing both familiarity and mystery. Along with a range of other composite creatures, such as a tortoise shell-backed hare and a vivid, rather unsettlingly big-eyed goldfish with arms and legs, the artist leans into this sense of weightlessness and the uncanny, suspending plant stems, water droplets, and other objects in the air.
Van Hillik’s work was recently included in Common Waters at Arch Enemy Arts, where he is also slated for a solo show later this year. Follow updates on Instagram.
