From the early 15th century to the present, The Netherlands has given us many great artists, including de Kooning. But it is the post-WWII movement called CoBrA that the contemporary Dutch painter Sylvia Hennequin (www.sylviahennequin.nl) seems most clearly related. Trained in Rotterdam, Hennequin wields a loaded brush with as much force as Karel Appel one of the founders of the CoBrA group and its most accomplished painter.

The resemblance is clear in Hennequin’s powerful painting “Scarface.” Just look at those impastos (as though the thick, viscous pigment was slathered on with a trowel!); those intense colors (particularly those glistening, visceral reds—like the ones in Soutine’s flayed sides of beef); that fleshy slab of a nose and those huge, mad, asymmetrical blue eyes, which are actually photographic images of eyes, either collaged or printed onto the painting surface, then flecked with green and rimmed with hot pink paint to make them even more monstrously compelling!

Like Appel, who even went so far as to affix plastic toys to one series of paintings, Sylvia Hennequin will stop at nothing to bring her paintings to riotously colorful life. Yet her genuine sympathy for her subjects comes across as well. Indeed Hennequin obviously savors the ugly as well as the beautiful aspects of the human condition, in her series of “Monumental Portraits,’ where some of the faces appear painted or tattooed with tribal designs, as they confront the viewer with a frank view that can be slightly disconcerting—especially when it begins to dawn on us that these friendly monsters may actually be mirror images of ourselves!

Hennequin goes even further than her CoBrA forbearers in her “Birds and Dicks” series, particularly one witty painting of disembodied phalluses sprouting from the ground, spouting plumes of smoke like factory stacks. In another painting as starkly explicit as Gustav Courbet’s vaginal masterpiece “The Origin of the World,” we encounter the livid pint vulva of a woman reclining on her back with spread legs. However the picture is anything but erotic; for her face is skeletal, with gaping black eye-sockets, and she belongs to a series of haunting figure paintings that the artist calls ‘The Essence of Darkness.”

By contrast, even parts of the faces of the figures in Hennequin’s “Berber” series are covered by their brilliant head cloths and their eyes are lowered in a manner suggesting if not modesty, the secretive nature of a mysterious ancient culture. And, as in all of Sylvia Hennequin’s paintings, including the anthropomorphic images of animals, one gets the impression of a prodigiously gifted painter plumbing the depths of our common humanity.

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Wilson Wong