Prof. Henk van Os, September 2002, Former Managing Director of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Professor of ‘Art and Society’ at the University of Amsterdam

Gerard Dou (a sixteenth-century Dutch artist, one of the ‘Leiden precision painters’) left behind a long tradition as a precision painter, and somewhere in the most modern line of this tradition one can find the works of precision painter Kees Thijn.

Kees is not only a precision painter, something special is going on here. In his works two aspects are present, association and transformation. When he has just, very meticulously started to paint a butterfly, a china vase or something else, it seems as if he surprises himself halfway through the process and associates it again with something different or even fills it up with something which is in total contrast – for example, a beautifully painted vase with milk pouring out of it.
Kees Thijn is a precision painter who is constantly occupied with his product during the painting process. That is exciting!

You may think ‘I am so good in the expression of textures on the surface that I am going to make it better by putting a totally different surface against it’. That is very special, not at all surrealistic or magical: a process of association is beginning where the textures, placed against each other, acquire an extraordinary meaning. A texture gains importance by putting another texture against it, and then you have a wonderful process of association that can sometimes be humorous. This is why I enjoy his work.
The other aspect is transformation. The different objects have a different symbolism each time. What I think is so special about the painting with the eggshells is that the eggshells need the ‘little things’ to support them, thus gaining another extra meaning. After having seen this, I detect symbols in most of the paintings – just like an ‘ism’, but beware of labelling too soon. An egg is the symbol of origin, of birth, but is also painted in a very fine texture. First of all, enjoy the experience of looking at it in your own way and then see that this egg really is an egg! Things have namely gone wrong with Jeroen Bosch. Jeroen Bosch has been thoroughly interpreted and all the eggs in his ‘Garden of Eden’ have been given the most profound meanings. But nobody has thought about how wonderful it is to really feel such an egg. For art historians all this is of great value in such a painting, and it should mean something too; at the same time, it is about the impact of that egg in the expressive context.
Each painting is an adventure of the precision painter Kees Thijn, who is constantly concerned about what he is doing, and that’s why he is an experimental artist. This is how I would like to characterise his oeuvre.