Kees Salentijn - Great expressionist. H(ors) C(ommerce) Litho "figures" pencil signed

• Kees Salentijn (Amsterdam, 1947) is a painter, collagist and draftsman. Salentijn trained at the Amsterdam National Academy of Visual Arts, liberal arts department with Otto de Kat (1907) and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. He lives and works alternately in the Netherlands, Spain and other countries around the Mediterranean such as Greece and Morocco.

Salentijn focuses on unconscious spontaneous creation in his work and feels related to various movements that also do this, including Cobra. Another important influence is his love for Spanish life: bullfighting, beaches, parties and landscapes typical of Spain are omnipresent in his work.
He often sketches and draws on the tours he makes with his Spanish wife and then works it out at home in Amsterdam or Venlo in a smooth style with many planes and splashes of paint in a gouache, collage or painting in acrylic paint. The work always gets a Spanish title.
At the beginning of his career he spent a long time studying the masterpieces in the Prado in Madrid and spent much of the 1980s traveling throughout Spain and also meeting many Spanish artists. In 1983, a major retrospective of his Spanish journey took place under the title “Extremadura”. The death of the matador Paguiri was the reason for Salentijn to make his first bullfight (corrida) paintings. In 1985 he brought together a number of works on this theme under the title “Les folies d'Espagne” and exhibited them in Amsterdam. The bullfight as a metaphor for the painter's struggle continues in his 'black period', the mid-1980s. After 1986, Salentijn painted sunny, colorful works under the name “Mediterreanism”.
(source: Apuntogallery)