About
Ralf Kokke (1989) was born to a family of dockworkers in Rotterdam Zuid. An almost separate class of people — within a practically closed-off social circuit — trapped between a 40-hour working week and a forced position of humility that leaves little or no room for individual contemplation, reflection or diversity.
The figures in Ralf his paintings are always bent and rugged. You can see how years of hard manual work have manifested physically and psychologically. In this respect, he feels connected to painters such as Co Westerik, Frits Van Den Berghe, Constant Permeke and Max Beckmann. They often depict figures who are stuck in certain structure from which they want to escape but fail to. From the start to the end of their lives, they are not able to escape the yoke of social pressure.
Ralf holds up a mirror of a world that is anything but beautiful, in which the fairy tale of the fight between David and Goliath is far from over, and neither are the struggles of the working class with regard to big capital or those of scientists with regard to climate sceptics or the lgbtq community with regard to traditional faith. The physical and psychological signs of oppression, the cartoon-like figures with their peculiar shapes do not show the proud worker, but rather the disillusioned human being who derives his right to exist solely from the lower class to which he belongs: that of the workhorses.
written by Manuela Klerkx (Art Agent)