What do you see? – A pair of eyes? A face? Or just colours freely composed, forms in an advanced state of voluntary disbanding. These are the questions that the painter Yvonne Behnke leaves to the spectator to answer, and she does so on purpose. The great British art historian Ernst Gombrich once developed the thesis that man can only see in a painting what he or she already knows.
At first glance, one doesn’t seem to know anything looking at Yvonne Behnke’s painting, however, this doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to see.
It is this openness of interpretation, which provides the unique appeal of Behnke’s art.
If a painting is a mirror of one’s own experiences, as Gombrich theorised, then this artist is opening a window to the unknown.
In part this is explained by Behnke’s technique. Covering her canvasses with successive layers of paint, she washes each layer off while the paint still remains fresh – only those parts that have dried remain. A process that she repeats over and over again until the painting is finished.
This way, next to the deliberate composition and the motive itself, coincidence also becomes a decisive artistic element. And at the end each painting resembles a palimpsest – an antique roll of parchment, which was used to write down what mattered, then cleaned and overwritten uncountable times. Just like a palimpsest Yvonne Behnke’s paintings tell more than one story. They are about the cohabitation of deliberation and coincidence. About what is and what might be. About facts and options…
They are about what you see – however, you need to take the freedom to look carefully.