Lof der Zotheid pin for visual artist Peter Koole

The paintings by Rotterdam-based visual artist Peter Koole (1958) are silent, all the more impressive testimonies of dramatic and unjust events that shock the world. Events that dominate the media for short or long periods of time, only to often fade into the background again afterwards. Unfortunately, we must later recognise that these very events proved to be of historical significance, and that we could have read them as signals. The fall of Srebrenica, the MH17 disaster, the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the arrest of Pussy Riot members. At this time, we recognise in Koole's work the moments when we could have known things were going thoroughly wrong. Restricting press freedom in Russia, political assassination, brutal attacks on civilian targets. Looking away has never been an option in Peter Koole's work.

Not an activist

As a basis for his paintings, Koole compiles elements from the media: news photos, newspaper headlines, fragments from subtitles on television. He enlarges these compilations into photorealistic paintings of monumental size. He brings together the languages of classical painting and mass media in powerful statements. To these images, he personally does not need to add much. The content of a painting by Koole often reads like an indictment and the form can be understood as a call not to forget. Yet the painter does not call himself an activist. He beats reality in an iconographic idiom that enters everyone's mind.

This does not make his paintings easy works. At first glance, they are pleasant, balanced compositions in a refined painting style. But we soon recognise the depicted subjects as confrontations with uncomfortable events that we prefer to regard as incidents rather than the signs of our times. For this very reason, the enormous consistency in his oeuvre over the past decades is admirable and brave.

Lof der Zotheid pin

In Rotterdam, Peter Koole's work has been exhibited in the Laurens Church and BRUTUS, among others. The presentation of the Lof der Zotheid pin will take place during the annual celebration of Erasmus' birthday on Thursday 27 October, at 5 pm in the Citizens' Hall of Rotterdam City Hall. At the presentation, Siebe Thissen, historian and philosopher, will deliver the Lof der Zotheid lecture: 'Erasmus as a moral compass in times of war. Hendrik Jan Mispelblom Beyer and Rotterdam (1941 - 1948)'.