Rob de Oude: See what happens

Contributed by Jacob Cartwright / It is no contradiction to observe that Rob de Oude‘s paintings in his solo show “Rhyme and Repeat” at McKenzie Fine Art are created with an exceedingly sober methodology, yet achieve intoxicating outcomes. To make something and to see something are two different things, and revealing the interrelationship between them— as de Oude’s do— is one of the greatest pleasures that paintings can offer. While it may seem inapt to call such an exacting technician an experimental painter, the designation fits. De Oude conducts his investigations in the controlled environment of his studio, where variables are adjusted with one goal in mind: to see what happens. 

From a technical standpoint, there has been a notable fixity to de Oude’s process over the last decade. His painting practice has adhered to a custom jig by which he brushes continuous straight lines of oil paint across his canvas from edge to edge. The constancy of this method contrasts with the variety of his visual outcomes. At times, the linear interplay in his paintings produces moiré patterns or other forms of optical fizz, and some evoke the mesmerizing drift of old-fashioned TV interference. In certain works, the sheer density of the lines generates a visual lacework, the underpainting glimpsed as if through pinholes. Increasingly, de Oude’s paintings display a finely woven luminescence. His three solo exhibitions at McKenzie have set the gallery aglow, each work humming as its own engine of light. 

His recent work has employed greater variation in line width, which is a seemingly prosaic innovation that has yielded big rewards. Where older paintings coalesced from a dense proliferation of similarly weighted lines, newer works feature pinstripes as taut as harp strings, interlaced with fat ribbons of color. These variations create intricately atomized stair-step patterns of varying proportions, each nested unit enclosing a smaller lattice of color that constitutes a composition in its own right. In the current show, de Oude embraces oblique angles, employing grids whose intersections slant in and out of ninety degrees. The resulting images seem to flex space in front of our eyes. His previous exhibition “Unity” had a more classical sensibility, with solid-feeling compositions composed largely of intersecting right angles that harbored soft, stable light. Those works conjured both the solidity and the translucence of marble. His new paintings, while equally luminescent, often seem woozily in motion, destabilizing the ground underneath the viewer.

Casual observers might file these works under Op Art, although de Oude’s embrace of process sets them apart from the work of many first-generation Op painters who mined modernist graphic design as much as painting tradition. Nevertheless, de Oude’s works do embrace visual disorientation, and fit comfortably in the lineage of patterned perceptual painting, including contemporaries Xylor Jane and Richard Tinkler. It certainly belongs in any serious discussion of contemporary art that utilizes an intensity of visual experience to address the fundamental experience of seeing. 

The crisscrossed patterns in his more rectilinear paintings carry visual associations that suggest folk forms—one moment the fine lines of Scottish tartans, another the bold zig-zags of Navajo weaving. None of these allusions feel calculated or quotational because they are arrived at independently, through making. 

Contemporary understandings may elide a key pre-industrial feature of folk art: the requirement that the maker renew its form in each iteration. Globalization has upended the folk transmission of cultural craft, yet its potential for meaning remains. While these paintings don’t seek to extend any specific custom, instead embracing a methodology of discovery, they still activate and bring to life a vast history of patterns and forms. While geometric folk forms often signified specific cultural meanings, it seems reasonable to infer that they were also valued because, like these works, they had intrinsic visual force and resonated with a deep and inexplicable familiarity. 

Reproductions of these paintings can be misleading, as they tend to impart rigor bordering on aloofness, which in-person viewing repudiates. The paintings don’t hide their process, and they’re made with abundant care that exudes humanistic warmth. A distinguishing characteristic of a mature painting practice is the way it commands a particular mode of perception. De Oude’s paintings trace a path of highly refined visual focus, where certain qualities of light are best apprehended at a distance but the intricacy of the work demands close viewing, opening up in progressively minute ways that challenge the limits of perception. At a de Oude opening, you will almost inevitably see a viewer hovering with their nose nearly touching the surface of a painting. The works offer a radical way of slow seeing that resists quick assessment and unfolds for however long one cares to look. In this way, the paintings are acts of generosity.

De Oude’s paintings stand out in several ways. One unique feature is the role of the brushstroke. While many hard-edge painters do their best to hide the brushwork, as it isn’t fully integrated into their concept, de Oude is an exception, using the lines within the brushstrokes themselves to subdivide the work into ever finer structures. However deliberate these paintings are, they hinge on the materiality associated with a certain set of tools coupled with the painter’s touch. From a technical standpoint, they could only be made with oil paint: de Oude’s seemingly inexhaustible strokes—defying their inevitable depletion—reflect his understanding and mastery of its properties. His color is also intrinsic to oil painting, applied wet-on-wet and thus mixed brighter than it will ultimately appear.

De Oude hails from the same Low Countries where, half a millennium ago, Dutch artists like Jan van Eyck pioneered and refined an approach to oil painting that paired precision with brilliant color. Both van Eyck’s and de Oude’s jewel-like paintings emit an even and enveloping glow of refracted light. At the turn of the twentieth century, Dutch artists carved out a cornerstone of international abstract art with the De Stijl movement, but de Oude is only the second Dutch-born member of the American Abstract Artists collective, founded in 1936, after Piet Mondrian. While de Oude’s paintings have a clear formal connection to Mondrian’s rigorous mature compositions, they are also linked to the optical color mixing in his early pointillist seascapes.

He has often invoked a spirit of cooperative action, describing his paintings as great numbers of smaller elements that, in unison, accomplish big things. His past activity as an instigator of collectively run gallery spaces in Brooklyn, such as Camel Artspace, Parallel Gallery, and Transmitter, reflects this point of view. His studio doors have often been open, and meetings and conversations have tended to happen in the company of the work on his studio walls. The cooperative spirit of American Abstract Artists, of which I am also a member, betrays its origins from the social left and a faith that egalitarianism and individual liberty can harmonize in a way that achieves a greater good. By the same token, these paintings articulate a viewpoint that places faith in the ability of humble work to yield progress and discovery. De Oude doesn’t express this viewpoint overtly or polemically, yet the work embodies his ideals and demonstrates the reward of a life both considered and open.

“Rob de Oude: Rhyme and Repeat,” McKenzie Fine Art, 55 Orchard Street, New York, NY. Through May 11, 2025.

About the author: Jacob Cartwright is an NYC-based painter and independent curator who writes about art.