The poem is composed of words extracted from Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and mashed up in a collage that bends their meaning, so that it’s a diffraction as much as an extraction. The drawing by Gerard Bellaart is titled “Study Apotheosis Lubertus Swaanzwijk.” It was executed in 2014, in color pencil and casein tempera, as the basis for an oil painting on canvas. The painting was destroyed in 2015 by a freak tornado that tore apart Bellaart’s home and studio in the French countryside.
When I look at Bellaart’s artworks, I see three separate but integrated aspects of his mastery: the large paintings that bring a dream world out of hiding; the drawings and etchings that range in emotion from intense frenzy to delicate contemplation both in subject matter and technique; and the inked printings of various kinds — such as the “fragmentations” and “stenciled texts,” as he calls them — which strike the eye with brilliant motifs based on ideas taken from literary sources.
