Dick Berckenkamp

Dick Berckenkamp’s Waiting from his Beyond Words series presents itself as a psychological landscape, capturing a moment of pause that has been translated into a vibrant, gestural dimension. The familiar silence of this pausing is destabilized by emerging expectation and an accompanying inner restlessness, as well as by explosive colors and rhythmic lines, making the work appear simultaneously grounded and fleeting. The painting thus evokes a scenario in which emotions lose their intangibility and transition into a state between thought and matter, standstill and eruption.

Although the composition on the canvas remains static, it unfolds a powerful suggestion of dynamics: the eye is guided across a dense core of fleshy red and pink tones, while sharp black lines intensify the impression of sudden movement. In this paradoxical effect, Berckenkamp connects to the tradition of “captured time,” in which the energy of a single blink of an eye is made permanent.

Stylistically, a comparison can be drawn to the late work of Martha Jungwirth: here, too, movement arises from seemingly intuitive, somatic placements. However, while Jungwirth often relies on flowing, atmospheric glazes to conjure memory and physicality, Berckenkamp achieves a similar visceral intensity through a more graphic tension between form and void, with a more abstract biomorphic shaping. In both cases, painting becomes the medium of an inner movement—a movement that exists in the fragile space between the artist’s impulse and the viewer’s perception.

The raw, neutral background reinforces the impression of a mental stage, as if a private thought had suddenly become visible and haptically tangible. This paradoxical effect combines structural line work with a biomorphic, almost organic eruption of color. The result is a work that defies any fixed classification: simultaneously structured and flowing, quiet and loud, familiar and strange. Waiting thus becomes a poetic interruption that invites the viewer to discover the vitality in silence and the complexity of the unspoken.