On the works of Painter on the Road

On the floor of an old gymnasium in Doorn lies a layer of black dust. It is not dirt. It is what comes off the drawings: charcoal grit, eraser crumbs, torn scraps of paper. Boronski does not sweep it away. It gets used again later.

Since the spring of 2026 he has been working in Unit 1, a former gymnasium in Doorn, on Painter on the Road. It started with a painting that no longer exists. In 1888 Vincent van Gogh painted The Painter on the Road to Tarascon: a painter walking to work with his gear on his back. The canvas hung in Magdeburg and burned in 1945 in the salt mine at Stassfurt, where the collection had been hidden from the bombing. The canvas perished, the image stayed. Francis Bacon made a series of studies after it in 1956 and 1957 without ever having seen it. He worked from a reproduction of something that was gone.

That is the point of departure. It is not the subject. The subject is what happens to material in the studio.

The first line is the cheapest

Every work begins with charcoal on paper. Charcoal is the only drawing material that disappears as easily as it arrives. One pass with the side of a hand and the figure stands differently, or no longer stands at all. That makes the first line cheap, and cheap is exactly what he needs. He is not looking for a good line. He is looking for a line that sets something off. The price comes later.

The walker is rarely drawn up close. He is a silhouette at scale, small against a field, with a posture you recognise from a distance. Who he is does not matter. That he walks does.

Shellac is the hinge

What turns a drawing into a painting here is not the paint but the shellac. A layer of shellac seals off what lies beneath it. It gives the paper an amber cast, it fixes the grit, and it puts the layer underneath out of reach. From that moment on he can only work on top.

That decision cannot be undone, and it is the most charged act of the day. As long as no shellac has gone on, everything can still be taken back. After it, a history has entered the work that he can no longer edit, only answer. This is how an image stacks up: layer, seal, begin again. What you see in the finished work is not the top layer. It is the top layer being contradicted by every layer under it.

Erasing and tearing are part of the making

There comes a moment when the work holds together, and that is the problem. Then he takes it apart. He wipes with a cloth, erases whatever stands too well, tears the sheet and puts it back.

This is neither anger nor pose. Erasure became a full artistic act in the twentieth century. Robert Rauschenberg made Erased de Kooning Drawing in 1953, a work that consists entirely of what he removed from someone else's drawing. Gerhard Richter later pulled a squeegee through his paintings, Anselm Kiefer built with ash and lead. Boronski does something smaller: he breaks an image down to see what can withstand it.

What survives the tearing is the ground. He begins again on that, not on a clean sheet but on what is already lying there, tear included. Most of the works in this project have been three or four other works first.