The Laboratory of Remnants

In Arnemuiden, Netherlands, a life began in 1955. It is a life that has largely been spent within the walls of a studio that functions more like a small laboratory than a traditional painter's workspace. The work of Loek Grootjans is not about the grand gesture, but about the meticulous collection of what remains. In 1998, he cleared out his studio, gathering every drop of spilled paint and every scrap of residue from the floor. These fragments were collected in a petri dish, a collection titled The Final Remains of a contemporary monochrome Painter.... It was an act of archiving the very DNA of his practice, treating the physical leftovers of creation with the same gravity as the finished objects themselves.

His approach to color was born from a period of sensory isolation. In 1988, he spent a month in a room without light, sitting in a dark void. When he finally emerged under medical supervision, his vision was colored by the afterimages of the dark: a red-brown glow followed by a green haze. This physiological experience dictated years of monochrome painting, where he worked almost exclusively in those specific shades of red-brown and green. He did not merely paint with these colors; he lived within the logic of them, eventually emptying his studio of its pigment to mark the end of that specific era.

Systems and Foundations

The practice is governed by a rigid, self-imposed framework. In 1998, he established the Foundation for the benefit of the aspiration and the understanding of context, a structure that has grown to include various departments and sub-departments. This system is not a mere organizational tool but a way of thinking that seeks to map everything while saying nothing. It is a method of categorizing the world through a series of divisions that attempt to capture the essence of existence through documentation and storage.

His collections and projects often involve the gathering of specific, tangible traces of the world and its history:

• Bottles containing samples of the great masters.
• The ground from the place where Vincent van Gogh was born.
• Water that has washed up on the Vlieland shore.
• The light that Piet Mondrian first saw in Domburg.
• Personal traces, including his own filth and the DNA profiles of those he meets.

Storage for Distorted Matter

Since 2008, the project Storage for Distorted Matter has been an ongoing attempt to archive the entirety of his existence. It is a massive, perhaps impossible, undertaking to record every person seen, every place visited, and every moment passed. He seeks to store the liquid files of a life, attempting to pin down the ephemeral. This project moves beyond the canvas, incorporating the physical and mental remnants of his life into a permanent, registered record. It is a way of confronting the impossibility of truly capturing a life, even as he continues to collect the pieces.

His work has been held in various spaces, including De Pont, Van Bommel Van Dam, De Beyerd, and SMAK. In 2010, the exhibition Leaving Traces at SMAK focused on three key works from his Foundation, highlighting the way his practice has evolved from the monochrome experiments of the late 1980s into the complex, systemic archiving of his later years. He remains in Breda, Netherlands, continuing to collect and record the distorted matter of the world.