Marking his first solo show, Dutch-Surinamese New York-based artist Miko Veldkamp offers various windows into cultural spaces, using 'pseudo-self portraits' to explore colonialism and identity.
Out of the many techniques and artistic methods that Miko Veldkamp employs in his debut solo exhibition, there is one that stands out: the act of painting spontaneously. No preliminary studies, sketching's, or drawings, Veldkamp here goes direct, going straight for paint on canvas, letting his work unfold naturally, features appearing unplanned in their own time.
Like improvisation or freestyling in music or poetry, painting in this manner allows the artist to discover their own hitherto unknown artistic impulses, accessing psychological tendencies that they may not be yet aware of.
Veldkamp's journey to New York, beginning from birth in Suriname to being raised in the Netherlands, is one that would lend itself to looking through a variety of cultural lenses, and one where identity is anything but fixed.
The paintings themselves are tender, colourful, almost childlike in aesthetic appeal, but reveal a serious quest to understand oneself, and to unpick colonial relationships that cover and conceal true identity. Even the title, ‘Buketan’, a Javanese word that came from the French ‘bouquet’, is a tradition in Indonesian textiles where European flora are entwined with indigenous tropical flora.
Cultural synthesis lies at the forefront of Veldkamp's work at the Alice Amati, embracing the ‘third space’ of colonial identity, where one is not inbetween colonial and subject, but a new, separate cultural space entirely.