Description

Hero & Leander takes its title from the myth of the two lovers separated by the Hellespont, and from Friedrich Schiller’s ballade of the same name. The painting refers to the story without illustrating it: two shores, a strait, a light. At first glance, the painting appears black and white. The lower part of the composition is dominated by a dark, dense band – the water, the strait – while the upper part opens into a lighter field. The composition is strongly horizontal, structured like a horizon: sky, water, earth. Yet the painting is not black and white. It was built in several layers of oil paint, and the brushwork carries the history of the image. The white is not a pure white but a broken, layered surface; the black is likewise composed of multiple colour layers, ending in a saturated, broken black. Material, gesture and composition hold the tension of the subject: distance, crossing, and the space between two shores.