I lived in the East Village, New York from 1991 till 1993. The apartment was on the 12^th floor if I remember well. From the windows I saw Alphabet City. In those days it was still a sort of no go area. The further you walked into the neighborhood, the rougher it became. It was one of those neighborhoods that were soaked in heroin and other hard drugs. Quite often I’d here shots and sirens.

What seemed strange to me was that one could live quite undisturbed next to such a place. Everybody hardly left his or her territory. 

One day I remember seeing a woman walking towards me. She seemed very attractive. I looked at her and she looked at me. But by every step she came closer, she turned more and more into a cadaver. When our paths crossed, she asked if I wanted to have her give me head for only 10 dollars… 

And there was that one morning that a guy wanted to sell me a revolver in front of my house.

I moved back to Amsterdam. What kept reoccurring in my mind was the view from the apartment. At night many windows would be lit like little aquaria. Filled with human beings who for a short moment would be living in their own paradise. All for a little money.

In those days I often painted with gouache on stretched paper. Once a long strip advanced. I stretched it and on it a reclining nude appeared. It reminded me of 'The body of the dead Christ in the Tomb' by Hans Holbein the Younger (seen below).

Which title to give… I chose for ‘Guilty Landscape’, thinking of Armando, an artist with some fame in the Netherlands. His works refer to the Second World War.

'Guilty Landscape', Armando.

Guilty Landscape, Bert van Zelm, 1993.

I have the tendency to go for series. A second followed, but to call that ‘Guilty Landscape bis’… The memories of the view from my window in New York gave it the title and subject. The first 'Fallen Angel' had landed.

What do people do, when they shoot up heroin… They take the short cut to paradise. This works for a while. But eventually they are haunted from paradise, they become a 'Fallen Angel'.

One after the other, the angels fell from the skies.

The sizes: mostly 45 x 133 cm.

In the same period butterflies fascinated me. They are like little fragments of weightless color and radiance. Fallen Angels and butterflies… Both are swindlers, beautiful appearances with no substancial continence.

At my framer the idea was born to let the works ‘float loose’ in the frame. This gave more the idea of a butterfly. The frame itself looked like a sarcophagus or a butterfly box.

I showed the first series in gallery Langenberg in 1995.

Gallery Langenberg (Amsterdam, 1995).

All together exposed in this way reminded of cemeteries in the Southern part of Europe as well. The dead are stacked in rows next and above each other.

39 fell out of the sky. Here you see some:

In order to see all 39 in a video, click on the image above.

After the series in mixed media on paper I made a new series in oil on canvas. Size: 50 x 180 cm.

‘Fallen Angel 001’ oil on canvas, 1996, private collection, Austria.

Like with everything, at a certain moment subjects dry up.

The last ‘Fallen Angel’ was produced in 2008. In that period they already had to compete with the bulls and bullfights, started in 2001.

I can always pick the theme up again. I still have a white canvas in the studio.

I have used one canvas of the same size in the vertical way for the ‘Spagnolita’ (private collection, Barcelona), in the horizontal way for a series of running bulls (private collection, Amsterdam), and two water lily canvases (private collection, Amsterdam and private collection, Utrecht).

click on the grey texts to go to the works.

Barcelona, September 2016.