Van Gogh
Abstracted

Van Gogh Abstracted is a study of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings through the colours that make up each work.

The project takes paintings from the oeuvre and processes them into vertical colour compositions. Each composition is based on the colours found in one painting. The original image remains the source, but the scene itself is no longer shown. A portrait, a landscape, a bedroom or a vase of flowers becomes readable through its distribution of colour.

This shift changes the way the work can be looked at. Instead of recognising a subject first, the viewer is asked to stay with the colours that usually support that recognition. Darker works, yellow interiors, blue night scenes, green fields and pale portraits can be placed next to each other without their usual narrative setting. What appears is a slower overview of the oeuvre, organised through colour rather than subject matter.

The reduction is not meant as a replacement for the paintings. It is a way of looking beside them. By removing the image as a scene, the project makes it possible to compare paintings that are normally separated by title, motif, period or location. The question becomes how much of a work remains available when its recognisable image has been translated into colour.

Seen as a group, the strips form a working atlas. They show how colour moves through the oeuvre, how certain temperatures return, how contrasts appear, and how individual paintings keep a specific character even after their subject has been removed.