Long ago I realized that when someone says “I don’t know if it’s art but I know what I like”, they really mean “I don’t know if it’s art but I know what I know”.
What they understand. What they are familiar with.
So over the years when people asked my advice on what constituted meaningful art to hang in their living-room, I replied that they should look at the work. And look and look.
If it continued to evoke some new understanding, a new insight or something novel, then it constituted meaningful art.
To create an artwork that continues to evoke new understanding, insight or novelty, it is commonly said that an artist must first have inspiration and uncanny insight himself.
Have insight? Have inspiration? Surely not, Cartesian dualism is archaic.
An artist is more than a conglomerate of separate parts which are external to his being.
In his poem "What I do is me", Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:
"Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came."
“What I do is me” – such an engaging pirouette of “I am what I do”.
It epitomises Binsfeld, for what he does is indivisible from who he is.
His art will long outlive him and, in the end, what he created will be what people know about him.
It will be the task of curators to lead people to new understanding and insight into his art through exhibitions and catalogues.
A catalogue must include a relevant biography that is more than a mundane litany of external influences, exposing instead what formed Nicolas and informed his art.
I leave it to art dealers and art historians to expound on the artists who influenced Nicolas … German expressionists, , Nicolas de Staël, Francis Bacon.
But when I look back over forty years of knowing Nicolas, I see underlying currents throughout.
I am honoured that Nicolas has asked me to share them with you.
Oh how we love to create ‘isms’ in an effort to better understand art! How handy categories can be to define and group disparate ideas, all the while showing how erudite we are!
Nicolas’ technique is painstakingly meticulous, minute in detail.
He is an amazing craftsman who paints without need of a drop-sheet for there is never a random drop.
This has led some to suggest that, at different times in his life, his style approaches Hyperrealism.
Such a view overemphasizes technique at the expense of expression, process versus colour and form. Nicolas’ art is informed by so much more than dexterity and craftsmanship, however meticulous.
As an analogy, compare any Binsfeld with Running the Numbers by the American hyperrealist Chris Jordan.
Jordan’s minutiae embodies technical rigour but, when all is said and done, Jordan’s technique overwhelms and defines his work. Nicolas’ technical attention to detail informs his art but does not define it.
Moreover, while Nicolas’ technique may vary in complexity and the degree to which it informs different works and different periods, his technique is one of the constants that runs throughout his life.
Compare his 1978 Crucifixion with his recent Nu.
Some have applied another “ism” to Nicolas, slotting his earlier works into the pigeon-hole of Impressionism.
Ah Pompon! As we chugged down Mandarine Napoléan and he smoked his pipe, “Docteur Conreur” would extol the power he wielded:
as a psychiatrist he could incarcerate people indefinitely without trial.
His real power was unquestionably his passion for the visual and literary arts.
A truly larger-than-life Renaissance Man and romantic aesthete, Pompon’s impressionist style was the antithesis of Dadaism’s distain for aesthetics.
It was ‘Pompon’ Conreur who channelled Nicolas’ youthful energy in artistic expression, arguably the greatest underlying current in his life.
From his deep friendship with Pompon, Nicolas developed his passionate humanity and his desire to live and love intensely.
It is largely Pompon’s legacy that Nicolas burns up life frenetically.
“What I do is me” and Binsfeld’s work is as intense as his life.
Like many of us born of parents searching for post-war social and moral stability, Nicolas Binsfeld embodies powerful and contradictory emotions.
Often deeply introverted, at times he can be surprisingly extroverted.
Nicolas harnesses his emotional and intellectual polarities - his art expresses a metaphorical two-way lens watching you watch him and watching him watch you.
Over the years I see less spontaneity and more in-depth content, more colour, more form. He balances J-P Sartre’s «l’être pour-soi» and «l’être pour l’autrui». Nicolas’ art has evolved to reflect less of his inner turmoil and more of his take on the external world, a world toujours-déjà donné [Sartre again].
Through the tempering of heightened self-awareness, his art is evolving to synthesise his earlier, more sombre meditation on mortality with a more passionate, deeper study of life and immortality.
Nicolas’ art is the antithesis of subjective Expressionism, it has always been universal and allegorical.
Binsfeld is impelled by the concept of immortality - the Greek concept of ???? [nous].
Even the Greeks couldn’t get together on that one: Plato defined it as “immortal soul”, Aristotle “intellect”, the Stoics “cosmic reasoning”.
I see more of Plotinus’ “objective reason” in Binsfeld, for Plotinus was also an aesthetic for whom there were three degrees of manifested beauty: human reason (the highest), the human soul (less perfect, being connected to a material body) and real objects (the lowest form of beauty).
This too, is a strong current in Nicolas’ river.
Nicolas always eschewed the impermanence of material possessions – money is something to be spent quickly on consumables before it can be used to acquire things.
Whereas his earlier works tended to express inward searching of the soul, he has evolved to Plotinus’ highest beauty, blending in an increasing dollop of reason and intellectual content.
Lastly, one cannot overlook the overarching and inherent aesthetic in Binsfeld.
Oscar Wilde's was an arch-aesthete. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is the story of a handsome young man naïvely unaware of the power of his good looks.
A “friend” teaches Dorian the way of the world, infusing him with human vanity and pride.
Through Dorian, Wilde pits our desperate thirst for youth versus fear of our inevitable old age, all bubbling away in an emotional cauldron of love, shame, hate and fear.
It is just so Nicolas Binsfeld! Dorian, being presented with a portrait, declares he would give his soul to remain as young and handsome as the painting, instead of growing old.
As the story pans out, Dorian’s morals and life-style spiral downward but he stays beautiful and young, whereas his portrait grows steadily older and more decrepit-looking.
I admired a Binsfeld portrait that reminded me of Wilde’s aesthetic tragedy, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
In show after show somehow it didn’t sell, or so Nicolas would have had me believe, and he presented it to me on my return to Canada after many expat years.
On the canvas back he wrote “Remember Dorian Gray”.
Nicolas has an intense and innate sense of the aesthetic which, perhaps more than any other current, informs his art and distinguishes him from, say, Francis Bacon.
It is his acute sense of the aesthetic which, to me, is the glue that binds his technical control, perception, emotional and intellectual expression into exceptionally vibrant art.
A sense of the aesthetic is perhaps the most difficult element to see in art.
To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, if you don’t know what an aesthetic painting is, look at the picture. And look and look …
Keith Wickens
Autoportrait, Ottawa, 1979
What they understand. What they are familiar with.
So over the years when people asked my advice on what constituted meaningful art to hang in their living-room, I replied that they should look at the work. And look and look.
If it continued to evoke some new understanding, a new insight or something novel, then it constituted meaningful art.
To create an artwork that continues to evoke new understanding, insight or novelty, it is commonly said that an artist must first have inspiration and uncanny insight himself.
Have insight? Have inspiration? Surely not, Cartesian dualism is archaic.
An artist is more than a conglomerate of separate parts which are external to his being.
In his poem "What I do is me", Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:
"Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came."
“What I do is me” – such an engaging pirouette of “I am what I do”.
It epitomises Binsfeld, for what he does is indivisible from who he is.
His art will long outlive him and, in the end, what he created will be what people know about him.
It will be the task of curators to lead people to new understanding and insight into his art through exhibitions and catalogues.
A catalogue must include a relevant biography that is more than a mundane litany of external influences, exposing instead what formed Nicolas and informed his art.
I leave it to art dealers and art historians to expound on the artists who influenced Nicolas … German expressionists, , Nicolas de Staël, Francis Bacon.
But when I look back over forty years of knowing Nicolas, I see underlying currents throughout.
I am honoured that Nicolas has asked me to share them with you.
Oh how we love to create ‘isms’ in an effort to better understand art! How handy categories can be to define and group disparate ideas, all the while showing how erudite we are!
Nicolas’ technique is painstakingly meticulous, minute in detail.
He is an amazing craftsman who paints without need of a drop-sheet for there is never a random drop.
This has led some to suggest that, at different times in his life, his style approaches Hyperrealism.
Such a view overemphasizes technique at the expense of expression, process versus colour and form. Nicolas’ art is informed by so much more than dexterity and craftsmanship, however meticulous.
As an analogy, compare any Binsfeld with Running the Numbers by the American hyperrealist Chris Jordan.
Jordan’s minutiae embodies technical rigour but, when all is said and done, Jordan’s technique overwhelms and defines his work. Nicolas’ technical attention to detail informs his art but does not define it.
Moreover, while Nicolas’ technique may vary in complexity and the degree to which it informs different works and different periods, his technique is one of the constants that runs throughout his life.
Compare his 1978 Crucifixion with his recent Nu.
 Crucifixion, 1978 |
 nu, 1995 |
Ah Pompon! As we chugged down Mandarine Napoléan and he smoked his pipe, “Docteur Conreur” would extol the power he wielded:
as a psychiatrist he could incarcerate people indefinitely without trial.
His real power was unquestionably his passion for the visual and literary arts.
A truly larger-than-life Renaissance Man and romantic aesthete, Pompon’s impressionist style was the antithesis of Dadaism’s distain for aesthetics.
It was ‘Pompon’ Conreur who channelled Nicolas’ youthful energy in artistic expression, arguably the greatest underlying current in his life.
From his deep friendship with Pompon, Nicolas developed his passionate humanity and his desire to live and love intensely.
It is largely Pompon’s legacy that Nicolas burns up life frenetically.
“What I do is me” and Binsfeld’s work is as intense as his life.
 Pompon Conreur |
 Pompon’s Still Life, 1971 |
Like many of us born of parents searching for post-war social and moral stability, Nicolas Binsfeld embodies powerful and contradictory emotions. Often deeply introverted, at times he can be surprisingly extroverted.
Nicolas harnesses his emotional and intellectual polarities - his art expresses a metaphorical two-way lens watching you watch him and watching him watch you.
Over the years I see less spontaneity and more in-depth content, more colour, more form. He balances J-P Sartre’s «l’être pour-soi» and «l’être pour l’autrui». Nicolas’ art has evolved to reflect less of his inner turmoil and more of his take on the external world, a world toujours-déjà donné [Sartre again].
Through the tempering of heightened self-awareness, his art is evolving to synthesise his earlier, more sombre meditation on mortality with a more passionate, deeper study of life and immortality.
Nicolas’ art is the antithesis of subjective Expressionism, it has always been universal and allegorical.
Binsfeld is impelled by the concept of immortality - the Greek concept of ???? [nous].
Even the Greeks couldn’t get together on that one: Plato defined it as “immortal soul”, Aristotle “intellect”, the Stoics “cosmic reasoning”.
I see more of Plotinus’ “objective reason” in Binsfeld, for Plotinus was also an aesthetic for whom there were three degrees of manifested beauty: human reason (the highest), the human soul (less perfect, being connected to a material body) and real objects (the lowest form of beauty).
This too, is a strong current in Nicolas’ river.
Nicolas always eschewed the impermanence of material possessions – money is something to be spent quickly on consumables before it can be used to acquire things.
Whereas his earlier works tended to express inward searching of the soul, he has evolved to Plotinus’ highest beauty, blending in an increasing dollop of reason and intellectual content.
 Design, 1978 |
 Doggystyle, 2006 |
Oscar Wilde's was an arch-aesthete. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is the story of a handsome young man naïvely unaware of the power of his good looks.
A “friend” teaches Dorian the way of the world, infusing him with human vanity and pride.
Through Dorian, Wilde pits our desperate thirst for youth versus fear of our inevitable old age, all bubbling away in an emotional cauldron of love, shame, hate and fear.
It is just so Nicolas Binsfeld! Dorian, being presented with a portrait, declares he would give his soul to remain as young and handsome as the painting, instead of growing old.
As the story pans out, Dorian’s morals and life-style spiral downward but he stays beautiful and young, whereas his portrait grows steadily older and more decrepit-looking.
I admired a Binsfeld portrait that reminded me of Wilde’s aesthetic tragedy, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
In show after show somehow it didn’t sell, or so Nicolas would have had me believe, and he presented it to me on my return to Canada after many expat years.
On the canvas back he wrote “Remember Dorian Gray”.
Nicolas has an intense and innate sense of the aesthetic which, perhaps more than any other current, informs his art and distinguishes him from, say, Francis Bacon.
It is his acute sense of the aesthetic which, to me, is the glue that binds his technical control, perception, emotional and intellectual expression into exceptionally vibrant art.
A sense of the aesthetic is perhaps the most difficult element to see in art.
To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, if you don’t know what an aesthetic painting is, look at the picture. And look and look …
 Remember Dorian Gray, 1971 |
 Figure, 2006 |
Keith Wickens
Manager, Canada Travelling Exhibitions Indemnification Program
Department of Canadian Heritage
Ottawa, 2009
Autoportrait, Ottawa, 1979