23 april 2024, Wouter van den Eijkel
An Ingenious choreography - new work by Jantien Jongsma and Stan Klamer
Gallery Maurits van de Laar is currently showing a joint exhibition featuring work by Jantien Jongsma and Stan Klamer. Both artists incorporate their immediate surroundings into their creations: Jongsma depicts Amsterdam's Slotervaart in her drawings, while Klamer's metaphorical cartography is inspired by the boats he sees passing by on the IJ every day.
With a joint exhibition, you can’t help but wonder why the gallery owner chose these two particular artists. Van de Laar explains that he finds the different perspectives of the artists intriguing: "Jantien's works are deeply rooted in daily life, transforming it into a sort of ballet or choreography with costumed individuals. Stan, on the other hand, takes a sort of helicopter view. He views things from a distance and then charts them, a metaphorical cartography in which he connects reality with abstract ideas and the spiritual."
Jantien Jongsma, Doordeweekse Dagen / On Weekdays, 2023, Gallery Maurits van de Laar
Ingenious choreography
Jantien Jongsma (1965) recently completed the project Back to the Future about Slotervaart, one of Amsterdam Nieuw West's suburbs built according to the Modernist ideals of light, air and space. In her drawings for the project, Jongsma focused initially on the greenery and birds of the parks, followed by the architecture. The neighbourhood residents eventually became the subject of her work. “I view the identical movements of people on the street as an ingenious choreography of shoppers, delivery workers and cyclists,” she explains. Jongsma links this choreography to another Modernist movement, Futurism, which also focused on costumes and stage design. In works like Winkels Plein Straat Staat Verkeer, the figures in futuristic attire adopt theatrical poses.
But Jongsma's clearest reference is to Suprematism, a movement that linked (mechanical) progress with emotion and personal interpretation of reality. Jongsma's work is filled with simple geometric shapes like squares, rectangles, triangles and circles. A piece like Doordeweekse dagen is almost entirely composed of these forms. It's also notable that Jongsma's palette is limited, akin to that of the Suprematists. Jongsma also draws from folkloric art. Many of the neighbourhood residents in her drawings wear traditional clothing like smocks or long dresses, and there's a lack of pure perspective. In other words, Jongsma's depictions are flat. The combination of folkloric elements and the progressive ideals of modernist architecture gives her drawings a warm and human touch, transforming the city into a playful and nurturing environment.
Jantien Jongsma, In the Future, 2023, Gallery Maurits van de Laar
This, combined with the naive drawing style and fully filled page, makes clear why gallery owner Van de Laar says that Jongsma's work has ‘something outsider-like’ about it. This is most evident in the largest work of the presentation, In the Future. This piece features two suns—one on the long side and one on the short side—so that the buyer can install the work horizontally or vertically.
Boats, boats, boats
Accuracy and reliability are normally essential to land and route maps. To get from A to B as quickly as possible, most people use Google Maps or other navigation software. But Stan Klamer (1953) throws that idea out the window. His maps don't take you anywhere. Instead, he uses them as a repository for images and ideas.
Stan Klamer, No Title, 2023, Gallery Maurits van de Laar
Prepare to embark on a nautical journey is the title of the booklet accompanying his recent series of work and it aptly reflects the essence. Much of his work features boats and dinghies of all shapes and sizes, executed in black ink with crews paddling, casting fishing lines or hoisting sails, and always with a perfect mirror image. In other words, there are no choppy waters, only calm sea.
Other drawings have a grid as an underdrawing and are filled with circles that may have different meanings, wind roses and knot connections that resemble constellations. It gives the viewer the feeling of looking at an early schematic representation of the cosmos, updated with information from the distant future, a kind of alchemical sci-fi map that we cannot fully comprehend.
Stan Klamer, No Title, 2022, Gallery Maurits van de Laar
Octagone
The drawings dominated by boats and Klamer's more spiritual and cosmological approach come together in Octagone, a map surrounded by a band made up of squares containing saints, animals, tools and islands. In the central section, we see boats steering from the upper left toward the large circle in the middle. In the other, smaller circles, we see islands.
While boats may dominate much of Klamer's recent work, they stem from his fascination with islands. Due to their remote locations, flora and fauna often undergo unique evolution on islands, resulting in remarkable species like the platypus (Australia) and dodo (Mauritius). Klamer's cartography points us toward islands where anything is possible in a grand, mysterious experiment.
Jantien Jongsma / Stan Klamer, Gallery Maurits van de Laar
