Ordeal: any extremely severe or trying test, experience, or trial. Synonyms: agony, anguish, calamity, distress, nightmare, torment, torture, trial, tribulation – Thesaurus.com

Here’s the funny thing: when you look up the definition of ordeal, the word judgment is entirely missing from the dictionary listing, and yet that is the etymological root of the term: in Old English it was ordāl, in Dutch oordeel, and in German Urteil.

Why do I care? So many thoughts emerged about the concept of judgement after visiting an exhibition, titled The Ordeal, of recent paintings by my friend Henk Pander in the Alexander Art Gallery at Clackamas Community College. Let’s disentangle them one by one.

First of all, as a friend I cannot objectively judge the artwork, but I can certainly describe my reactions and put them in a context of what I know about the artist, which might help to understand what propels the art. Then again, it might be pure speculation, but that is the bread and butter of the critic. I certainly hold with Oscar Wilde’s notion, expressed in his preface to his 1891 novella The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.”

Henk Pander photographed by me in his studio in 2017 during a double portrait session

Experience first.

The college’s Alexander Art Gallery, located in the award-winning Niemeyer Center that opened several years ago, is a windowless, effectively lit space that reminds of a sheltered cove, an impression fostered by a brown, highly reflective floor which resembles the surface of water mirroring the paintings on the wall.

It is a place of calm, until you lift your eyes and look at the walls: then all hell breaks loose.

The power of fire and brimstone, skeletons, skulls and wrecks, mythological creatures bent on destruction and barely human figures dancing on the ruins, all in intensely saturated, vibrant colors momentarily takes your breath away.

Henk Pander Rising Water (2015)

I was familiar with many, perhaps the majority of these paintings, having encountered them in the artist’s studio. The effect of seeing them grouped together, undistracted by any other visual input, precisely and mindfully lit, sequenced in a way where all are directionally anchored in relationship to their neighbors, elevates the work to a whole different dimension.

The exhibition consists of 8 enormous oils on linen, and 6 large pen-and-ink drawings which thrive on the contrast between their size and the pristine executions of small strokes, thin lines and subtle markings.

They also provide material for teaching about artistic practice: some of them are studies or just alternate versions of the oil paintings. Here is one example (referencing Rembrandt’s Night Watch, linking to art history as well).

Henk Pander Dawn (2017)

Thoughts next.

What drives a life-long preoccupation with apocalyptic scenarios and mythological narratives that predominantly reference death and destruction? Why remind us of threats to nature, of plane disasters, with pilots deliberately drowning themselves and their plane’s human cargo, or warmongers shooting planes down? Why dwell on the violence of man killing man, or mythological creatures symbolizing sudden, inevitable harm? No matter how expertly painted, how creatively crafted, how defiantly clinging to beauty in all its visual instantiations, these paintings are about horror, that which is unleashed upon the world by evil forces, that which is experienced by the subjects of the painting, and that induced in us who view the cruelty on hand. Or so one thinks at first glance.

Henk Pander Abyss (2015)

A possible explanation could be guided by the very first painting in the round, if you start with a clock-wise exploration of the art on display. The canvas unveils an autobiographical scene from the artist’s childhood, being shipped off to a region of Holland where food was still available during the hunger years under Nazi occupation. The existential horrors of war and deprivation, imprinted on a young child that saw death on a daily basis and witnessed the fear, despair and other intense reactions from the adults in his life, might guide an artistic exploration of the topic. Given the continuing abundance of existential threats to individuals and/or our planet, the sensibilities of the adult artist might be used to draw parallels.

Henk Pander The Skipper’s Wife (2015)

I believe there is something else going on here, though. For one, Pander was raised in a rigidly Calvinistic culture, a religion he long left behind with his emigration to the United States so many decades ago. Dutch Calvinism might have embedded parts of its philosophy deeply enough to exert continuing influence, if only in explicit rejection. Secondly, the artist’s formative years were spent being educated by the premier art teachers of his time in the Dutch academy, infused with the tenets of Dutch art history starting with the Golden Age of the 17th century. These two factors interact, I want to argue, producing work that is not about the witnessing of horror per se, but the fragility of our existence, caught in the very moment where something irreversibly changes, never to be the same again, raging at the claimed inevitability of it all.

The Dutch have a name for that circumstantial reversal, staetveranderinge, a term derived from the Greek word peripeteia, and a concept embraced in Dutch paintings since the 1600s. The change could be in any direction – from anguish to praise, like in Rembrandt van Riijn’s versions of The Angel appearing to Hagar, but most often captured when circumstances shifted irrevocably to disaster, like Jan Steen’s Esther, Haman, and Ahasuerus.

Jan Steen, Esther, Haman, and Ahasuerus, c. 1668, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.

The preoccupation with “state change” corresponded with the rise of Calvinism, a religion that dominated the Dutch provinces and led to long religious wars against Catholic nations but also to boundless prosperity, shaping the evolution of commerce and empire.

Henk Pander Don’t Look (2015)

I’m obviously oversimplifying, but one of Calvinism’s tenets was about judgment and inevitability: the doctrine of predestination, which implied that G-d had already decided everyone’s eternal fate before he created the world. Some, then, were destined to thrive and find salvation, the rest were not. Election was by the grace of G-d, reprobation, on the other hand, the judgement of a G-d bent on just punishment. Calvin himself is cited: “The praise of salvation is claimed for G-d, whereas the blame of perdition is thrown upon those who of their own accord bring it upon themselves.” I will, to the end of my days, not understand this logic, somehow it’s our own fault if we are bad, all the while being predestined to end up in hell. Riddle me that. In any case, things were inevitably decided from the start.

Judgement didn’t stop with the authority on high. Calvinism had judicial assemblies composed of the church’s ruling elders and the pastor, who watched over, regulated and judged the issues of the congregation. In fact there are historians who claim that the social control of Calvinism reached all the way into the social lives of the Dutch: their windows, even on street level, have no curtains so that everyone can look in (a custom that disappeared only during the last few decades). The cultural quirk was rooted in the concept that a praiseworthy Christian had nothing to hide.

Henk Pander Harpy (2015)

Cherished protestant traits like hard work and frugality, and the eagerness to spread the gospel of Calvinism around the world, helped establish colonial empires (never mind resource extraction and slave labor and trade). The 17th century United East India Company (VOC – Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) prospered from the East Indies (Indonesia) to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), bringing untold riches home to the Netherlands, as did its later sister company trading the Atlantic regions, the West India Company (WIC.)

That wealth spread among a relatively large new middle-class, highly educated and willing to spend some money on the arts – they had plenty of master painters to choose from. The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel lectured in his Ästhetik:

“The Dutch painters also brought a sense of honest and cheerful existence to objects in nature. All their paintings are executed meticulously and combine a supreme freedom of artistic composition with a fine feeling for incidentals. Their subjects are treated both freely and faithfully, and they obviously loved the ephemeral. Their view was fresh and they concentrated intensely on the tiniest and most limited of things.”

This was written 200 years ago, about painters from 200 years earlier still. Applies to Henk Pander’s work across various media as well, with the cheerfulness restricted to water colors of floral assemblies and landscapes, the focus on ephemera ubiquitous in his oil paintings. But he also captures the vision that his artistic forbears were so keen on, the point of no return when the plane drowns, the earth floods, violence arrives in its devilishly incarnation, the sharpness of the Minotaur’s skull echoed in the thrust of erection, the Harpy harbinger of the fall of towers.

Henk Pander The Minotaur (2015)

Is the depiction of all these ordeals and threats, over and over again across his artistic lifetime, a nod to the inevitability of our fate? Or are the paintings, in contrast to and in rejection of religious determinism, a warning? Do they imply the possibility that there are ways to prevent catastrophe, escape harm, make the world a less violent place if we abdicate our lust for power or our addiction to materialism? Is the work about agency rather than inevitability, the possibility of change rather than a set fate?

Are the increasingly thick slathering of paint and the choice of – yes – occasional garish colors signs of the artist’s smoldering rage at the futility of his warnings? An outcry that no-one heeds the predictions of yet another prescient artist putting the writing on the wall – or the marks on the canvas, as the case may be?

Henk Pander Excerpts from Native Soil (2015)

I do know that people tend to look away, despite the awards and accolades Pander has accrued across a lifetime, with works included in the collections of the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), Museum Henriette Polak (Zutphen, The Netherlands), City of Amsterdam, City of Portland, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena), Portland Art Museum, Frye Art Museum (Seattle), Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (University of Oregon), and Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Willamette University), where a fifty-year retrospective exhibition of his work was shown in 2011.

The avoidance is not so much in judgment of the art, but likely an act of self preservation, not wanting to disturb our already fragile equilibrium. More agony, anguish, calamity, distress, nightmare, torment, torture, trial, tribulation? Bad news sells in the media. In the arts, not so much, unless they are a particular contemporary darling of the art world. Historically, art that defied the powers that be or let us in on their malfeasances was censored by church and state alike. These days, free market mechanisms are all it takes. If people are avoiding that which troubles them, commercial galleries or museums who depend on sales and visitor numbers, respectively, are not rushing to put us through the ordeal of witnessing. It’s a judgement call, they say, with varying justifications, but a clear view of the bottom line. More power to educational institutions, then, that provide access, in an environment that does the work justice.

You have a chance to judge for yourself. There is an urgency in the paintings that deserves our collective attention.

Henk Pander Excerpt from Water Rising (2015)

The exhibition is free and open to the public until the end of the month, with an artist reception this Thursday Jan. 19, 2023, noon-1 p.m. Henk Pander will speak about his work at 1 p.m. There is plenty of free parking in front of the ADA accessible building.

Niemeyer Center at Clackamas Community College,

19600 Molalla Ave.

Oregon City, Oregon 97045

Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Here is another review from Oregon Arts Watch.