THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS.- GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art, presents Jeroen Allart, on view through August 28, 2005. Clear, simple and colourful: three adjectives that sum up the paintings of Jeroen Allart (b. 1970). His exhibition at the GEM will fill six rooms with highly simplified paintings of landscapes. He has earlier produced humorous paintings not only of cats, rabbits and other animals, but also of cowboys, firemen, windmills and boats.

Jeroen Allart’s work has a refreshing lightness of touch. His amusingly simple paintings require no complex explanation. There is almost no other artist who shows us so directly what he wants us to see: a horse’s head, a burly fireman or, as now in the GEM, a landscape. Landscape painting tends to evoke associations with a past era but these are instantly banished by the first glimpse of Jeroen Allart’s work. His landscape paintings are invariably composed of a number of completely stylised elements – a field, the sky, a farm. Combined with the bright colours he uses, this simple visual idiom gives the landscapes a strong graphic quality. This is no accident: Allart completed a vocational design training for the graphics industry before attending the National Academy of Visual Arts (Rijksacademie) and the Willem de Kooning Academy. The choice of subject, unfussy shapes and bright colours of the series of landscape paintings to be shown at the GEM give the works a serenity that reflects that of the Groningen landscapes that inspired them.