TODAY TOO I EXPERIENCED SOMETHING I HOPE TO UNDERSTAND IN A FEW DAYS
Fleur van Dodewaard (1983) describes her working process as a constant search for a visual language that does not yet exist. 'By the time you get to grips with it and you have made it your own, it dissolves and you have to start all over again.’
‘This visual language that keeps on changing shape forever, moves along with life itself. That life that can not be held back or tamed. In which a new ‘now’ keeps on presenting itself, in which things relate in new ways and everything always feels different than before.’ On the road, the art keeps the artist company. It moves along, mirrors, confirms, questions, brings freedom as well as obstacles, love and hurt, challenges, surprises.
Van Dodewaard: ‘When I make a work in my studio, I am in the present. With my hands in the material, I am here and now. I feel open. In the past year, I specifically concentrated on this way of working. I focus on my body and try to let go of thinking. I let my hands be in dialogue with the material on their own. The works you see in this exhibition are the result of these moments of freedom in making. When improvising, other things, exciting things, emerge. It's about surprising yourself, and others. Unconsciously you take along everything you have seen and experienced in art and outside. It is inside you. How you relate to these existing forms is manifested in the work. As a viewer in an exhibition I’m also searching for this. It’s a poetic space inside you. You can look for it everywhere, it is not reserved for art. My wish is to always be in that now.'
The exhibition TODAY TOO I EXPERIENCED SOMETHING I HOPE TO UNDERSTAND IN A FEW DAYS features objects made with oil paint on canvas. You could call it painting, but the approach to the material is physical and spatial. The works are variations of elementary interventions in the material. The canvas has been cut, folded, pasted, painted on. There are tiny holes in it, and the cadmium yellow and red, the viridian, violet and ultramarine have been applied so dilutely that you can see through. The canvas objects are applied directly to the wall with nails. These works are combined with porcelain objects. It results in a direct dialogue between the two mediums. Despite the difference in materiality and appearance, they mirror each other as the objects emerge from a similar approach. The ceramic sculptures are made of white porcelain from Limoges during an artist-in-residence at the European Ceramic Work Centre earlier this year. They are thin three-dimensional objects, also presented on the wall. The porcelain has been rolled out, folded, marked, cut, and glued back together. Both the canvas and the porcelain, have been made with minimal interference in the material.
Van Dodewaard: “I always try to make only a small but very precise intervention. A seemingly meaningless gesture, like a simple line on a sheet of paper. I draw that line and say, 'it's you and me'. I try to balance at the point where nothing becomes something; something becomes nothing. I’m looking for that single interruption which will be just interesting enough, feels just right. I think this is not necessarily easier then trying to put a lot of things inside the work. I am drawn to this imaginative point in between everything. Where you might think there is nothing to see is exactly where it all happens.'
Van Dodewaard continues her unique way of working in the open field of painting, sculpture and ceramics. Consciously leaving out photography this time. 'Photography allowed me to do things that couldn't be done in another way. It is a world in itself. I used painting as a reference but I have always longed to leave photography out of it. I managed to do that now. Working in the studio with the material is a physical process and using photography creates a distance from that reality, which was an important part of my work. But I don't want that distance anymore. At least for now. In this presentation of the work I show the objects I worked on with my hands in the studio, in the here and now of the exhibition space.‘
The title is a line from Jørgen Leth's 1967 short film Det Perfekte Mennesske / The Perfect Human. Van Dodewaard: 'This beautiful poetic film explores what 'the perfect human' would be like. This theme of questioning our existence resonates with me. My work is always somehow an attempt at trying to answer it. On my own terms. Again and again. - Because life, how should that possibly be lived for God’s sake?’
Fleur van Dodewaard (1983), born in Haarlem, lives and works in Amsterdam) studied Photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Theatre at the University of Amsterdam. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including POST gallery (Tokyo), Flowers Gallery (London), Museo d'arte Contemporanea (Rome), Gallery VAGUE (Kobe, JP) and Villa Vitrine (Kyoto), Van der Mieden Gallery (Brussels), FOAM (Amsterdam), Hauser Gallery (Zürich), KAIR (Kamiyama), Project Fabric (Moscow), Hyères Photography Festival at Villa Noailles (FR). Her work is included in the collections of the Frans Hals Museum Haarlem, FOAM Amsterdam and Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar