October 2008. Diederik Kraaijpoel, "Sparkling theatre". Foreword in the book "De viering van het leven".

Sparkling theatre

All art is theatre, but some works of art are disguising themselves as reality:
for example portraits or still life’s, which look literally like a copy. One can go far in that, as is shown by the wax statues at Madame Tussauds, where sometimes a joker posts as still as the same statues.
In Kees Thijn’s art this kind of confusion does not happen. Sometimes he paints a look a like portrait but, he ads all kinds of curious things such as for example a chicken, a volcano or a butterfly. The observer understands immediately: this is not real.

The fantasy scenes are composed in such a way that we never lose sight of the theatre. Mostly we see a flat Dutch landscape with a low horizon, which forces us to look at the scenes from downwards. The sky covered with decorative styled clouds can at any moment split open like a curtain: it is the screen behind the stage. The stage-properties are real, they are objects out of daily life. In the painting they get however an alternative life, they float in the air, burst out, creatures are growing out of them, in short they behave like participants in an interesting performance. One can call this surrealism, but than without the pretensions of the truth or a specific meaning, which is generally disturbing the pleasure of looking because of their inevitable melancholy.
The theatre of Kees Thijn is a sunny colourful ballet, from where broken vases or rotten apples cannot withdraw themselves. What kind of music belongs here? Something gay, maybe Vivaldi or Satie. The more I see of his work, the more I like it.

Diederik Kraaijpoel,
artist, author en former teacher of the "Academie Minerva" in Groningen