Bart Drost

The performance 'the sea,the boys and me' that Bart Drost performed as part of this exhibition was the basis for the final exam work in 'salt, sand, sea'. He rolled out a cotton cloth, painted with light blue waves. Around it he placed youth portraits of himself. There are 2 football boys hanging on the wall, in line sawn out of plywood. Both figures are placed on the canvas.
Drost smears himself with yellow paint and then, with his bare body, creeps in wave motion on the canvas.
The boys' silhouettes are placed on the canvas. The whole is sprayed with black acrylic paint.

With this performance he declares himself "one of them" and from that moment the boys make their appearance in his work and he resolves to get the boys out of the sordid environment of the sex industry and to pay them tribute through the arts.

In the years that Drost studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, he laid the foundation for his later art works. In the accountability at his graduation, Drost quotes words from the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa: "I shudder at the thought of how little I have remembered what my former life was like".

Drost recognizes that 'past life' in the image of 'the boy'. Everything seems to converge in this figure. He is not concerned with one specific boy, but with the universal fact that everything flows, everything changes, in other words that everything passes away.

In addition to the image of the boy, Drost sets the image of the sea, of infinity. Again and again he paints hundreds of small 'waves'. All the same, all different.