Frank den Os (b. 1965, Dordrecht) came to painting after a long career as a playwright, where words shaped his world. But when he relocated to rural France, the silence of the landscape began to speak in a different register. Nature revealed itself not just as a subject but as an insistence, a force that demanded expression through image rather than text.

This moment of rupture became the foundation of his current practice of exploring colors as substantive presences. For Den Os color equals vibration; memory, place and emotion distilled into hue, texture, and rhythm. His paintings do not offer landscapes in any literal sense but instead create atmospheres of perception where clarity and ambiguity coexist.

Across his body of work color functions as a living framework and emotional architecture. It shapes the mood, anchors the gesture, and holds contradictions within the same field. Light emerges, then dissolves; shadows appear not as absence of color but as a confirmation of their chromatic weight. His canvases operate as thresholds between presence and withdrawal, between what can be named and what resists language. Each painting and collage holds its own, but all share an intention: to let color act as an emotional ligament, binding us to what is fleeting, unresolved, or too fragile to name.

Many of Den Os’ pieces reflect an ongoing interest in internal conflict and how unresolved emotions, memory, and perception shape our experience of the world and of ourselves. Through layered surfaces, ambiguity in form, and shifts in tone, he touches on spaces that hold contradiction without a need to resolve.

The Profanities series, for instance, examines how the parts of ourselves that feel difficult or disruptive are often the most revealing. These works question the boundary between vulnerability and visibility, and the emotional cost of being witnessed without true understanding. Other paintings, rooted more in landscape or atmosphere, reflect on movement, transition and the perdurable tension between belonging and dislocation.

Underlying much of the work is a desire to slow down perception and reflect on what is emerging, fading or quietly persisting beneath the surface. Whether pointing to frustration, renewal or emotional suspension, each piece tries to trace the shape of experiences as they unfold; never entirely fixed, but always deeply felt.