When you write about Christian Rex van Minnen, it is often started with some sort of descriptive text about ugliness, the grotesque, something bulbous, something swollen or jellied. The talent, the application of paint, is both reverential and revolutuinary, but we are stuck in trying to tell ourselves and our readers that van Minnen paints something that is hard to look at. But change in the self, change in the world around us, is often quite ugly, or leaves one exposed to something transitory and undefined. In the new show, L’or mord l’os (gold bites bone), Cadet Capela notes of van Minnen “His paintings show how experiences of change can be physically felt, transforming the body into a host of these metamorphoses.” Alongside the sculptures of French artist, Ken Sortais, he too an artist where the transitory nature of the self and the full flesh is one in flux, SPRING 2024 cover artist van Minnen’s painting are gratifyingly at home and in great context. Both artists challenge the contemporary world while understanding of the past. But they enhance each other in the notion of what both technique and spirituality can be together. —Evan Pricco
