Studio Visit #12. Hgtomi Rosa

Last week the artists of Hgtomi Rosa organised an open studio event from Thursday to Sunday.

Hgtomi Rosa are Jan-Dirk Adams, Daniele Formica, Jiao Jiao Li, Yukari Nakamichi, Constantijn Scholten, Laura Snijders and Alex Webber.

They are artists who are not just making art to show it in a gallery, hoping to sell it at a nice price to a nice art lover or collector.

They are artists who are interested in the making of art as a process related to the appreciation of art.

Their works of art are not just developed to become autonomous and authoritative objects; the relations between the viewer, the space, other objects, the reason why a work of art is presented in a certain way, are just as important, if not more important.

To them making art is not just a material process, it is an intellectual or emotive experience in which the viewer can take part.

Within that context these artists don’t just make paintings and drawings, they also make installations, do performances, and they organise situations in which the viewer can feel free to participate and have his/her own experience.

As a viewer you need not feel compelled to participate, but the artists are as interested in your experience with their work as you are in their work.

To them art is something to be shared.

For the occasion each artist presented a new work of art in the front space of the building.

As usual the artists were hospitable, and their studios showed almost inexhaustible streams of ideas and inspiration.

It is important in a city like The Hague to have a bunch of energetic and talented young artists around who want more than the aesthetics of autonomous art.

It is all the more disappointing that in a city like The Hague, with its cosmopolitan aspirations, giving opportunities to these artists isn’t high enough on the agenda, in spite of the things that have indeed been achieved.

Of course, as a young artist you are perfectly well aware of the fact that being an artist is not the easiest way of life.

However, building a normal life is a complicated and expensive business these days, let alone if you want to build a life as an artist.

The tyranny of the market has penetrated all veins of life, it is preached as the common religion of our society, and it wants young artists like these to be competitive, instead of doing what they are good at.

But let’s not get too gloomy (being gloomy definitely doesn’t help), as, after all, the energy and inspiration given by people like these artists is valuable, and it was there to be experienced during the open studio days.

So, if you missed this, be sure to attend next time Hgtomi Rosa presents something!

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© Villa Next Door 2022

Contents of all photographs courtesy to the seven artists

Bertus Pieters

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Studio visit #11. Jenny Ymker

Some days ago i visited Jenny Ymker (1969) in her studio in Tilburg, the city where I also saw her works for the first time in a group exhibition at PARK.

As i didn’t know her work, it caused a bit of a shock, the wonderful shock of seeing something unexpected and interesting.

Staged photography is the basis of her art, in which she is always the only protagonist.

It can be either an idea or a place – more often the combination of the two – that inspires her, but her photo’s are always real situations; there is never an artificial backdrop.

Even if it means she has to stand in the snow without a winter coat in freezing temperatures, or in other peculiar circumstances.

She showed me an attic full of props she uses for the pictures.

She’s very picky about clothes, shoes, handbags etc. as they must give the right and unique impression of the character in the picture.

On the other hand the protagonist in the picture should also be more or less timeless, free from too much connotations of the present or the past.

We talked a lot about the making of art, the development of ideas and concepts and – of course – about technique.

Some of her compositions are made as models for tapestries, in which, after having them woven, she sometimes embroiders certain parts to give them extra accents.

Weaving needs a lot of extra thought, as it can only be done with a maximum of twelve colours.

So certain colour nuances have to be made in a more or less pointillist technique.

The results are however extraordinary as the tapestries are quite monumental, and there is no raking light, like there would be on paintings or photographs. The colours of the tapestries are totally absorbing.

Of course, Ymker also makes pictures that are not really suitable for a tapestry, but which work very well in a light-box (see picture above).

She also experiments with video, not to make works with a lot of movement or with a story, but just to make slowly moving pictures (see pictures above).

Over all, her works combine a sense of humour and a sense of loneliness.

Because these two fall together so perfectly well in her works, i probably had this shock when seeing them for the first time.

It is a bit strange that her works are usually not shown in the context of photography, especially because she uses such a big potential of photographic possibilities, including printing and projection.

Time passed quickly that afternoon as we discussed a lot, also about all kinds of aspects of being an artist today.

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© Villa Next Door 2021

Contents of all photographs courtesy to Jenny Ymker

Bertus Pieters

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Studio visit #10. Ton Kraayeveld

The last word about painting will probably not be spoken in the foreseeable future, though painting has been declared dead almost every decade since the 1960s.

It is not that the discipline is so phoenix-like that it heroically resurrects once per ten years.

Neither does it renew itself revolutionarily.

It just flows with the waves and the winds.

It is a very opportunistic discipline, especially because it is both witnessing and imagining, and technically it is very versatile.

Although some painting-lovers seem to prefer to live in the past, as even some painters themselves seem to, painting – like most other basic art disciplines – is actually something very much of the present.

Circumstances and situations are decisive for how painting looks like, as paint itself can be used almost seismographically.

This week i visited painter Ton Kraayeveld (1955) in his studio in Dordrecht.

He told me about decisive events in his life for his paintings.

For instance a residency in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, two decades ago, fostered more social awareness in his work.

At such a moment different things seem to come together, like – in this case – the light and colours, the influence of Modernism on colonialism and its aftermath etc.

Another decisive moment was the almost stubborn appreciation of a gallerist for a work made up of short words, which Kraayeveld himself regarded as no more than a playful joke.

It resulted in what has become an important aspect of his oeuvre.

Very short words are the mortar of our languages, they are like short jumps in time and space, both meaningful and meaningless.

What is very much visible in his work at the moment is a visit to China, a few years ago.

Again, different aspects of his trip are visible in his work: its formal language, – again – the use of Modernism, visions of political power, etc.

While outside sunshine and rain alternated in Dordrecht’s narrow streets, we talked about painting and its reasons dictated by life itself, about its past and present, about its technique, about individual and common experiences, and  the hours passed easily, almost too easily….

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© Villa Next Door 2021

Contents of all photographs courtesy to Ton Kraayeveld

By the way, Kraayeveld’s work is at the moment online on show at Gallery Viewer: click on the following link:  https://galleryviewer.com/nl/galerie/54/galerie-helder/kunstenaars/715/ton-kraayeveld

Bertus Pieters

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Studio visit #9. Yaïr Callender

It was a grey day when i visited Yaïr Callender (1987) in his studio, in a seemingly forgotten suburb of The Hague near Broeksloot Canal.

Exactly the time and place not to be distracted by road signs, colourful advertising, cars and other visual noise, and to value the shapes and characters of things and objects, and to see how man and nature work on them.

Once it must have been part of human instinct to closely examine and read the environment, to literally see what it had to tell us and to inspire our imagination.

Somewhere in the history of seeing there must have been some sort of point where nature became culture in the perception of man.

When i arrived, Callender was working on a hexagon, sanding and judging its surface.

We discussed the point where a spot either remains just a spot or becomes something significant in its structure and colour. He also told me he likes the hexagon as a shape.

It has more possibilities than for instance the rather stable square or than the circle with its connotations with eternity etc.

Apart from natural processes Callender has a keen interest in the basic shapes of culture and how they personify human thinking. Clearly, making is a kind of thinking to Callender.

That is also a great difference with carpentry – the trade he is trying to earn a daily income with.

He likes the work itself but it is quite different from art in that it is – for all its aesthetics – purely practical.

Walking around in Callender’s studio one could easily get the idea that being an artist is a kind of romantic business where everything will shape itself if the artist is in the right mood.

Nothing could be further from the truth however, as Callender has to critically think and rethink his ideas while working and watching and also thinking about the practicalities of things.

Will the objects he is making have the right impact on the viewer, and how will they behave in the exhibition space?

And then there are the common everyday practicalities: how to organise your daily business such that you can give your art the dominant and professional place in life it needs. Well, the common story for any artist i guess.

Callender is best known for his monumental work, but his care for detail also brings him to works in which these details attract attention of the viewer and will make the viewer look further for details.

These details may be sculpted, drawn, painted or anything else, as long as they make the viewer wonder and associate.

Any intervention, any detail in a work adds to the meaning of the whole work, whether it is the surface of it, the colour or structure or any sign.

We talked things over with a cup of coffee until we both had to go our ways, back to the rumour of daily life again.

Next month Callender’s work can be seen at Omstand in Arnhem and later somewhere this year in Delft.  

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© Villa Next Door 2021

Contents of all photographs courtesy to Yaïr Callender

Bertus Pieters

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Studio Visit #8, Tanja Smit

Artists who are not represented by a gallery have to find their own ways to catch the attention of their audience.

Having an open studio weekend is one way of doing so. Last weekend Tanja Smit (1961) had one in her studio in The Hague.

I’ve known Tanja for decades and there has always been a remarkable and wonderful consistency in her work.

In the past she has stayed for quite a few years in Barcelona and last year she visited Xiamen in China for a residency at the Chinese European Art Center.

In her work there has always been a sense of wonder about the world, its shapes and its signs, what they might mean and how that could be visualised.

In the actual artistic visualisation there is still this sense of wonder as the materials seem to dictate their own ways of expression and finding meaning.

During her already long career Smit has used different materials. However, paper and water based materials like ink and water colour seem to have become the most prominent, although she also uses photography.

One room of her studio was dedicated to her so-called text works.

She has taken newspapers, magazines and books and has re-edited them. For each work she has chosen a certain ‘key’ to re-edit it.

The ‘key’ could be certain words or groups of words and their meanings, or the shape of certain words, or the open spaces in a text, the shapes that seem to be hidden in texts, or even the lay-out of a page.

In that way pages with texts – sometimes with illustrations or advertising – seem to show another meaning than just the meaning of the words and sentences while being transformed into a new composition at the same time.

She uses both Dutch and foreign texts. In China she wasn’t able to read the texts, but still she has made text works based on Chinese texts as a visual meaning could still be distilled from them.

These text works also have a very rhythmic appearance and some of her works have been used as music scores.

Recently this year she was invited to make text works from Bible texts on the occasion of the 400^th anniversary of the Dordrecht Synod.

She co-operated with musicians to create a musical performance at Pictura in Dordrecht on the base of these text works.

Some scenes of that performance were presented on video as well. In fact, with music she has brought the sense of visual wonder even one step further.

Apart from these fascinating text works she also makes drawings, but, in one way or another, the procedure seems to be the same as in the text works.

The paper already seems to bare the shapes in it and Smit’s only task seems to be to literally draw the shapes from the paper, just as she draws the shapes from a text.

In her drawings the interaction between paper and ink or water colour is crucial.

© Villa Next Door 2019

Content of all photographs courtesy to Tanja Smit.

Bertus Pieters

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Studio visit #7: Pim Piët

It was already quite some time ago that Pim Piët (1954) and i agreed to meet in his studio. We often meet at exhibitions here in town.

It is quite difficult not to meet at any vernissage in The Hague as we are both always eager to know what is going on and what is on show.

Last winter he had a presentation at De Spanjaardshof, the building where he and many others have their studios. It was a small (the space itself isn’t that big) but impressive installation with painting, panels creating alternative, more intimate space, a standing bell and sound.

It was a tranquil and reflective installation, great to see and experience during those dark winter days.

Others might have made it into a woolly, quasi-mystical scene, but that is far from what Piët aims at. For a long time he has been using words in his paintings, often just single words.

Words don’t just have a meaning, they also have a shape. The shape intermingles with the meaning and both define his paintings.

A bit like words defining a poem and its shape.

Of course colour is also a defining factor in his paintings. As for the sound, there has been a good co-operation between him and composer Anna Mikhailova(1984) for the last few years.

Piët’s word paintings, often rhythmic, have a quality that allows, even welcomes music and sound, not just for a background but as an equal partner.

As such his co-operation with Mikhailova has proven to be a very fruitful one. Mikhailova in turn has a very good feeling for what Piët wants in his pictures.

Maybe surprisingly, when we saw each other in his studio we hardly talked about his individual works.

We did talk about the marvellous light in the studio, about the general conditions for making art and about different tendencies in making exhibitions, but i guess his works, covering the walls and part of the floor, quite spoke for themselves. Piët’s work is, as it is for almost all artists, a labour of love.

Labour was one of the aspects of life we discussed.

As for many artists Piët has earned a living with other, non-artistic labour. He purposely didn’t choose for a more ambitious or intellectual job, he needs his intellectual capacities for his art work. On the other hand even the most unintellectual jobs need a sense of purpose and dedication if they are really useful.

We agreed however that even this sense of purpose and dedication is denied to workers these days as efficiency is aiming at higher profits to generate more money for shareholders instead of aiming at a better and meaningful life for workers and a better service to the public.

One can even see it in the way young artists have to work in this country.

We were discussing this with Piët’s wonderful works around us and his materials and books as witnesses of what purpose and dedication can really bring in life.

For those who fear we ended on a bit of a pessimistic note: we didn’t. I think for both of us seeing and making art is too fascinating to become pessimistic about.

As to me it was a very inspiring afternoon. Thank you Pim!

© Villa Next Door 2019

Content of all photographs courtesy to Pim Piët.

Bertus Pieters

 

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Studio Visit #6: Melle de Boer

 

Last Monday i visited Melle de Boer (1972) in his studio in Billytown. I had seen pictures of his latest paintings on facebook and i was eager to see the real thing.

It took some time but at last we met and we spent the afternoon talking about art and – of course – about painting.

De Boer took up painting again last autumn. You may know him, apart from his great work as a songwriter and singer, as a wonderful draughtsman.

In his drawings his lines are self confident on one hand but on the other hand always in search of the unexpected.

They are cartoonlike. The figures, signs and sometimes the words always find their own way in the white space of the paper following their own logic, and they often have a somewhat surrealist sense of humour.

Why he has taken up painting again, he told me, was, as i interpret it, more or less a matter of soul searching.

The way he uses the figurative in his drawings, using humour as part of his way of expression, could also be interpreted as a way of hiding from what keeps him really artistically busy in his mind. Also, painting is technically more of a challenge and it offers you more of a struggle, both technically, artistically and mentally.

He decided to paint non-figurative representations, so as to be busy with the material, the composition and its expression, free of any interpretation of recognisable shapes or situations, free from references to the real world, not to be distracted

We agreed painting is difficult. As soon as you start painting there is a heavy weight of traditions on your back and shoulders which you have to bare, ignoring it, condemning it, admiring it. But the main point is: there is the paint itself.

Apart from the colours it can be glossy or matte, it can be transparent or opaque, it can be thick or thin, it can be exciting or just bland, it can surprise you or it can be terribly unsurprising.

Finding a balance is a matter of a lot of trying and not being afraid. One’s biggest mistake may turn into one’s most brilliant idea and the other way round.

Brilliant ideas are to be mistrusted when painting anyway. We also agreed that there is no way of being totally abstract or non-referential.

After all, even a simple geometric shape like a square has a meaning in one way or another. We looked at some works he has been busy on. We talked about the monumentality of smaller and bigger paintings.

One greyish painting has, in red, the name of Georg Trakl, the great pre-WWI Austrian poet of whose work De Boer is a great admirer.

Simply describing it, it is a grey painting with some blackish lobes and of course that name written in red, but when you walk around it, you see the different structures of the paint, the ideas proposed, rejected and becoming part of the painting. Any painting artist may recognise these aspects and they keep on fascinating both maker and viewer.

The main problem in painting (as it is in art in general) remains how to surprise oneself without imposing one’s will on the painting or one’s own mind.

De Boer is too much of an artist not to have himself surprised. His hand, like in his drawings, does not shy away and is always in search of the unexpected.

The paintings show a world full of tension, a clash of positive and negative, toughness and sillyness. Personally i can’t wait to see his paintings shining in a show. It would be a new chapter in De Boer’s work (as it already is).

And there is of course also Henk & Melle’s new cd We Are All Rockstars, a title that says it all. Thanks Melle, it was an inspiring afternoon!

© Villa Next Door 2019

Content of all photographs courtesy to Melle de Boer.

Bertus Pieters

 

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Studio visit: Matthias Grothus

The other day i paid a visit to Matthias Grothus to write an article for Villa La Repubblica about his newest work The Last Unicorn. Click here to read the article (in Dutch).

I saw a video of the work on Facebook and was intrigued by it, so i contacted him and saw the work the next day in his (temporary) studio.

Grothus usually makes works that are moving either mechanically or by simply plugging in a power cord.

As such they often look both intriguing and understandable.

Although it has been fashionable last few decades for works of art to be ‘disturbing’, Grothus’ moving objects are in a sense comforting.

They show what the human mind is capable of without the use of obscuring digital techniques and they challenge the viewer to use his own imagination.

He stresses the need to care for human imagination and to respect the material and its potential we use.

As such mind and material are very much interlinked in his works.

He showed me his new work The Last Unicorn and we were busy making pictures and videos of it while chatting about the joys and pitfalls of art.

© Villa Next Door 2018

Content of all photographs courtesy to Matthias Grothus.

Bertus Pieters