George Smits
©Courtesy of the Estate George Smits, Antwerp
Light and colour
In 1980, George Smits cites the following quote from Aldous Huxley's 1956 essay Heaven and Hell, by way of elucidating his own thoughts and realizations regarding light and colour:
“In visions one experiences an overload of what Ezekiel terms ‘Stones of fire’, or what Weir Mitchell calls ‘transparent fruit’. These things are self-illuminated, possessing extraterrestrial colour radiance and extraterrestrial meaning. The material objects most similar to these sources of otherworldly brilliance are gemstones."
Whether it now concerns dazzling fluorescent silkscreen prints, light installations with brilliant colour-spectra or deep, glossy colours of oil paint, all of George Smits' pictorial work has but a single and sole aim: to evoke a concrete 'heavenly' experience for the viewer.
The fluorescent day-glo paint intesifies the sensory experience of the viewer. This technique experiments with paint colour combinations applied freely with a sieve, rather than working with an exposed image.