Why Jeroen van Merwijk likes to welcome you to his studio: 'Being a cabaret artist is not a profession.'

'Everyone has an Apple. Everyone has a Corneille. Nobody has a Van Merwijk. So the question is whether Van Merwijk is any good. Nobody knows that. Then the challenge is for a few great people to buy a Van Merwijk. After that, everyone wants to have a Van Merwijk. When that happens, I will start making other work again, because I don't want to sit back and stick to a style for market reasons. Baselitz has been painting everything upside down for forty years. Who comes into his studio in the morning and says: what shall I paint upside down again?'

While the whole of Amsterdam celebrates the Holland Festival, Utrecht artist and cabaret artist Jeroen van Merwijk puts himself in the shop window. Literally. From 4 June to 9 July, the writer will be painting behind the window of Kunstruimte Kuub in Utrecht. You are welcome to drop by. Indeed: everyone is cordially invited to come and have a chat. I asked the painter about his motives.

No action will be taken

'I don't think I'm working like a madman all day. I hope people come to see how things are made. The threshold has to be lower. I will sit here and welcome people. But there will be no performance. This is really about my painting.'

Then indeed, let's talk about that painting. Van Merwijk is one of those painters who leaves no corner of his canvas untouched. What hangs in Kuub is mainly his fully painted collage work of the past few years. On the gallery's now famous cloister brick wall hangs 'army' work: images on papyrus, specially brought from Egypt, as no papyrus of that size can be found in the Netherlands.

The Malfet Group

In the collages, the painter incorporates older paintings from his oeuvre. Also paintings from the time when he painted under the pseudonym Malfet. Those days are now behind him: 'I think it had to do with my divorce. I thought then that I should start revising some things again anyway. I did. So now I'm just Jeroen van Merwijk again.'

It also proved difficult to keep the two personas separate. Sometimes the French painter did become a kind of cabaret artist again, as, for example, that time he a group exhibition of themselves organised at the posh Hague artists' society Pulchri: 'That was more or less a joke. I had made up all kinds of people, eight members. I had made portraits of them, written biographies of them.'

'And then had a big exhibition at Pulchri Studio in The Hague. I'm a member of the society, and as a member of Pulchri you can rent exhibition space, but only one room each time. I wanted all the rooms, and you can only do that when you are a group. Or dead. Dead I thought was a bit rigorous. So I made up a group. I hung all the rooms full of all different kinds of paintings. After all, I make different work every year, so that wasn't so difficult. One time blue pen drawings, another time Cross shots, another time still lifes, whatever I feel like. So it was still very believable that it was made by all different artists.'

The gift of the word

With the disappearance of the name Malfet, Van Merwijk is looking for another reputation, other than just that of lyricist and cabaret artist: 'Of course I am a serious painter, that's what I was trained for. My only profession is visual artist. Being a cabaret artist is not a profession. I did that without training. I could always express myself verbally well. That is different from many fellow artists who can only express themselves through their art. I gained the gift of words. I have lived by that for a very long time. I would rather paint and be involved in art all day, but you can't make a living from that. Cabaret gives me livelihood and has also given me a lot.'

Van Merwijk's strongly graphic-oriented work is full of texts, applied in blue ink over the older paintings. People looking for a column or a song will be disappointed. Van Merwijk writes his canvases full of biblical texts. Has he gotten into the Lord?

Bible texts

'No I just think they are beautiful texts, and I needed a lot of text. But because we in the West are completely steeped in the Bible, I think it's appropriate that I use Bible texts. Our whole art was religious until the late 19th century. I do feel akin to that. You can also see some 'taking down the cross' with me. Those kinds of symbols are part of Western European art.'

The densely written texts are a pure form element: 'It is glacis. Old paintings also used to have a transparent layer applied, green over red for example. With that, you remove a lot of colour and pull the image together.'

Will Jeroen van Merwijk teach Kuub's visitors about his work? Rather not, says Van Merwijk. He prefers to engage in conversation: 'A lot is said about visual art, but that's actually not very interesting, because art tells its own story. With art, you never see what you would most like to see: how art is made. You never see how a work is created. So I'm going to sit here, and I'm going to draw here.'

Zooierig

'When you come here the first week, and you come the third week, you see how that drawing has changed. Then you also see how much work it is, and how pain strike making art can be. When you go to look at a gallery, you see the work hanging when it is finished. You forget it was made. That's why I sit here, to show how it is made. And, of course, to interact with viewers. So I've created a studio here, which looks a bit like my studio in France. That's even zooier, but I made it as zooier here as I could.'

'In France, it's a much bigger mess, as befits an artist. I put on some music and I go to work, as I do in France. Talking to people. I'm there myself if they have something to ask, instead of hanging something up and being gone again.'

Price n.o.t.k.

So anyone who might have thought that Jeroen van Merwijk led a reclusive existence as a painter in France: it's a sweet spot there too. 'I just feel like having a chat. With that, I want to take the sanctity off art. It's just work.

And it's just selling, of course.

'I also plan to agree the price of the paintings further with people. That I just ask: what do you think it's worth? For example, there is a drawing hanging here, I spent 300 hours on that. What does a plumber earn per hour? 60 euros? So then it should cost 18,000 euros. I think it will be less. But so then people start thinking about value. Why should an artist have to do all that work for nothing while everyone else gets paid for it? That way you can explain things and they start to see the value more. How much fun, but also how much effort goes into it. There should be something in return.

Going about your business endlessly

Because Jeroen van Merwijk would prefer to paint all day, if only he could get a fair price for his work. He much prefers that to cabaret: 'Performing is real work. So is painting, but in a different way. To perform, you have to go to a room with 150, 200 people, often in a hall that can hold a thousand. You have to win those people over, hang in the light, be nervous, stay on top of your concentration. With painting, it's different. Then you can do exactly what you want. With performing, you can't go your way endlessly, can't say everything, because at the end you're sitting in the auditorium with no one at all.'

Of course, it remains difficult to make a name for yourself as a comedian in a completely different discipline. For the buyer, art is often not so much about the work itself as about the story he can hang above the sofa. Then 'a real Van Merwijk' is still quite difficult to sell, he realises: 'Then they have to say that Van Merwijk is a very good painter. Nothing wrong with that, because they are also very good paintings. But that is the objection. That people say, "Oh, he also has to paint so much." Which is also what they say of Jeroen Krabbe. But he has painted all his life and is now trying to be a serious artist. I understand his problem. You make yourself suspect, so to speak.'

Pierre Janssen

One solution could be for Van Merwijk, with his verbal talent and humour, to get a role as an art explainer on a public programme like DWDD. A new Pierre Janssen.

'I would love to do that. But more in a way that focuses on the craft, rather than the emotion. Enthusiasm is important. I want to tell about things I like. That's more interesting than talking about the artist's life all the time.'