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Co Westerik is considered one of the most important post-war Dutch artists. The camera gets very close to his paintings, demonstrating how disquieting his visual language can be.
Painter, aquarellist, draughtsman and graphic artist Co Westerik, born in The Hague in 1924, is considered one of the leading figurative post-war Dutch artists. Westerik employs a minutely realistic style, but the representations are a distortion of reality, rather than an exact reproduction. In one of Westerik's most famous paintings, a finger cuts itself on grass, but at the same time the finger seems to eat the grass. Director Jan Wouter van Reijen shows how disquieting and alienating Westerik's visual language can work by filming the paintings in extreme close-ups. This is Van Reijen's second documentary about the painter. Five poets composed poems to Westerik's work. Rutger Kopland wrote: '...I don't want to see it, but I have to/how that dog and that hand/change/into hundred others, how we are that/no longer.'

Credits

Producer
Production company
Interakt
Distributor NL
Filmmuseum Distributie

Title: Ik wil het niet zien, maar het moet
Year: 2002
Duration : 1 hour, 21 minutes
Category: Long Documentary
Edition: NFF 2002

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