(…) It is fascinating to see how Paul Nellens can let water, with or without pigments, flow and splatter on the paper. How pigments go their own way and colour and non-colour take form.
Nevertheless, if you look closely, you will see that Paul is like a conductor. He decides of the place and the intensity. He decides the periods of rest, the white parts and the open spaces.
If representations have on one side a strength that flows from this way of painting, on the other side they radiate rest and serenity.

It is the three-dimensionality, the suggestion of space that gives rest. Still there is more. This experience of “space” – in the largest sense of the word – is carried by the movement of light.
Sometimes light can be soft, sometimes exuberant or just scarce, sometimes scattered, and then again directed. It is this light that allows you as spectator to breathe and to give you the opportunity to take in the images.
It looks as if the recognizable image becomes less and less important, the image becomes more and more a carrier of inner experienced emotions (…)

Elsbeth Veerman about Paul Nellens,
opening speech at the January 2003 exhibition