John Van Brakel
- Anna Lilli Garai
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
John van Brakel paints in The Hague, not far from the sea. But location doesn’t figure much into his work. What matters is structure—how something is built, how it holds, how it shifts. His paintings begin with lines. From there, repetition takes over. Sometimes they stretch, sometimes they tighten. He follows where they lead.
His route to abstraction wasn’t rushed. He started in realism, then explored cubism. Geometry stuck. It gave him a language he could keep using without repeating himself. With each painting, he sets up a new set of terms.
A few lines, a pattern, a constraint. Then he works inside that. It’s not about control. It’s about seeing what happens when you let a structure unfold.
The materials are simple: mostly acrylic on panel. The surfaces are smooth, the edges clean, but nothing is mechanical. You can sense the decisions in each composition—the pause, the adjustment, the moment where something could have gone a different way. There’s no signature colour or shape, no fixed formula. Some works feel dense and gridded, others loose and spare. What connects them is attention. Nothing is added without reason.
Van Brakel doesn’t chase a final image. He doesn’t work toward a specific look. Each piece is more like a conversation with itself. One line leads to another, one spacing forces a shift, one area holds tension that needs to be resolved or ignored. Some works arrive quickly. Others take longer, sit in the studio, wait for the next move. The process is quiet, but focused.
What keeps the work open is its refusal to declare anything. There’s no title that points to meaning, no text that sets a path. The compositions are self-contained, but never closed off. They allow space—for looking, for noticing, for slowing down. For van Brakel, this is the point. A painting doesn’t need to say more than what it shows. It just needs to be clear about how it’s built, and honest about when it’s done.
He approaches abstraction not as a retreat from the world, but as a way to stay with it differently. In the repetition of forms, in the balance between parts, in the small movements that shift everything. There’s no grand message. Just a steady rhythm. A way of working that pays close attention to what’s right in front of him.
