Robert Van Vranken

When you or I drive, walk, or sail to a new place, we often use maps and charts to help visualize our journey and to create our itinerary. These abstract translations of the physical world are useful tools. Of course, we know that a map of a country or the chart of a sea is not actually a place, but only a stylized set of lines, colors, words, and numbers. We must learn to read these symbols before we can begin to grasp the actuality of the mountains and valleys, roads and trails, islands and harbors that we will encounter on our travels. But what if you don’t want to travel from point A to point B or visit the Grand Canyon? What if, instead, you want to undertake the journey from melancholy to meditation, or experience the terra incognita of dreams? What if those maps and charts were the true reality, leading us in turn to hitherto unrealized promontories and escarpments of the mind?

These are the inverse worlds created by Robert Van Vranken. In his paintings, he has charted journey to mysterious place where unknown laws prevail, the logic of which just eludes our grasp. We wonder at the impenetrability of open windows, for example as in Untitled (Cloche on Tripod), and the inscrutability of the objects assembled in front of them: a surveyor’s tripod on which sits a curious scale surmounted by a bell jar. These are physical objects indeed, intended to measure distance, weight or volume, but seen here they seemingly measure the invisible attributes of being. As we travel over expanses of ever-present water in the other paintings, we are continually confronted with tools of mensuration and navigation; a plumb line, a compass rose, scales, a surveyor’s ranging pole, even a detailed “supplementary method for finding courses.” This last image bags the question posed by all the paintings—a course to where? The clues are in the paintings, but inevitably the answers lie within you, the viewer.