Eric Bos, art critic, December 2002

In the 1960s, a Dutch painter who let the sun shine in the grey reconstructed streets of Amsterdam became popular. This artist was Melle. I remember clearly that at that time there was an exhibition of his works at the famous Gallery Mokum in Amsterdam.

Gallery Mokum was specialised in realism of all kinds, surrealism, magical realists, meta realists. They painted a world that only exists in dreams, a world full of absurdities in which the boundaries of the here and now, day and night, time and place, are removed. A game is played. Everything on these paintings actually looked absolutely normal, nicely painted, as it should be: still lifes, people, town squares, thundery skies – but something was terribly wrong with the combination of all these daily life elements, although one did not realise immediately what it was.
We only have to call to mind the paintings of Carel Willink and Moesman to know what I mean. A naked woman walking through a fashionable area of Amsterdam with a letter in her hand, another nude woman on a bicycle in one of Utrecht’s cross-streets. It could have happened but it never did. Nevertheless, on the paintings of these realists, magical realists, meta realists or surrealists it was quite normal.
As a young man these mysterious images convinced me that those paintings were all about real art, like the art from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is also full of these particular images.
In my opinion, art is – before modernism forced us to think differently – a painting of which you don’t immediately understand what it’s all about, of which you have to guess the intention and learn to understand the message. This was serious art too, because those kinds of scenes generally looked grim, as if the world could perish at any day. Later, Melle appeared and things became more cheerful. Melle mixed sunny colours on his pallet; he let fishes fly through the sky and birds live under water. Sometimes male organs would swing as poplars in the wind. Some landscapes! That was clever and daring! Melle brought eroticism into surrealism and also sensuality, warmth and a zest for life. Carel Willink pales if you have experienced Melle’s fleshy warmth and scenery. Willink’s Mathilde Willink and Sylvia Quiël are lying down cold and inaccessible in his paintings. Today I am thinking of Melle because Kees Thijn derives from Melle’s school in a certain way. Within all modernisms of the past 60 years, surrealism has gone its own quiet and silent way. You may notice that after Melle, Wout Muller is the great follower as master of sensual surrealism, but where Melle is the man of fishes, Muller is the painter of snails and toadstools that dance about with eroticism.
In the work of Kees Thijn we come across snails too, but above all we find poultry, cocks, turkeys and butterflies. Like Melle, Kees Thijn creates mysterious paintings. In contrast with the painted world of Melle and Muller, Kees Thijn uses quite different themes. It is true that the mild humour of the absurd and the occasionally refined worked-out pictorial jokes predominate; the landscapes are full of rumpled little apples and the recent series of white vases refer to something completely different – to the decline of things, the dismantling, even the decay that, in the end, sooner or later everything and everyone in this material world falls prey to.
Humour, relativism and melancholy play the main part in the surrealistic scenes of Kees Thijn. Even though Thijn reminds you of Melle and other surrealists, he has a strictly personal world. There is however another similarity: like Melle and Muller, Kees Thijn is an autodidact. These artists had to struggle to be able to express their artistic thoughts and to get a grip on shape, embellishment and composition, but exactly because of that they were loyal to themselves. No art academy, no lessons in art history kept them away from their own treaded path. So please try to understand the message in the scenes of Kees Thijn. Let him lead you into his world and enjoy his wonderful ingenuity.