13 june 2023, Wouter van den Eijkel
No smile. No service. Dirk Hardy's perfect solo debut
Very rarely does someone debut with a completely sound concept, which is also perfectly executed and leaves enough for the viewer to interpret. But that's exactly what Dirk Hardy did. With his completely stylised sets of people in checkout booths, he tells stories that touch on social themes. His solo debut Vivarium, on which he worked for five years, can now be seen at Rutger Brandt.
What do you do when you come up with an idea that is so good that it will last your entire career? It's tempting to go public with it right away, but it's perhaps wiser to keep it to yourself and only reveal it once you've gained an unbridgeable lead over any competitors. Dirk Hardy did the latter.
Hardy (NL, 1989) graduated with a degree in photography from Rotterdam’s Willem de Kooning Academy in 2014 and for the past two years, has been taking part in group exhibitions with separate episodes, as Hardy calls his works. All in all, Vivarium is a solo debut that was in the making for five years.
The idea for the series that he later dubbed Vivarium, a collective term for artificial ecosystems behind glass, came to Hardy in 2018 on the beach at Hoek van Holland. “I saw someone sitting all day in a cashier booth while everyone around him was having a good time. I thought: I have to do something with checkout booths. This lets me express how I view people and the world.”
Since then, he has been designing and building sets in his studio. His characters work behind glass. They sell tickets to circuses, merry-go-rounds and horse races, deliver meals or work in security. They feel unobserved and a rushed transactional setting comes to a halt, so that you can feast your eyes on it. “As a voyeur, you can get very close and look around at what is happening in detail.”
That is convenient because there is a lot to see in Hardy's modern trompe-l'oeils. Not least because every object and every character is rendered flawlessly. From the lace curtains to the pre-rolled cigarettes in The Wheel (Episode 8) to the newspaper clippings on the wall and the bubbles that the YouTuber’s daughter blows in Echo Chamber (Episode 11), nothing is out of focus. “My goal is to remove the photography from the equation. I do not show the photographic with a blurred background or a specific shutter speed. I make a hyper-realistic scan of the world I have created.”
A moment that never happened
“You're basically watching a moment that never happened. My work are montages or collages,” says Hardy in the gallery. He photographs every object from a fixed point of view with the camera on a tripod. "That camera doesn't move in any direction for three or four months. I photograph the objects and people separately in different positions to give me the freedom to tweak things afterwards on the computer."
The work lies in building the sets and collecting attributes, though even more so in deciding what works and what doesn't. “Of course, there are many objects that have been part of a work for a while, but were ultimately not used because the work became too crowded.” It is a very slow process, yet one that results in works with an unprecedentedly good set design. So good, in fact, that you start to doubt whether you haven't already seen the scene somewhere.
Dirk Hardy, Vivarium, Episode 7: Intermission, 2020, Rutger Brandt Gallery
Add to that the fact that most references in Hardy's work do not refer to photography but to painting and cinema – the reflection in a balloon in The Wheel is reminiscent of the work of Jan van Eyk and the interior of Episode 7: Intermission seems to come straight out of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey– and you understand why Hardy doesn't think of himself primarily as a photographer. “I see myself first and foremost as a visual artist who uses the medium of photography to create a hyper-realistic representation. The photograph is only one part of it because the glass participates in the narrative, as do the frames.”
1-on-1 multiverse
The term ‘frame’ is not actually the most apt description because it is not a gold leaf border of a canvas. Rather, the frames are an integral part of the concept. Each episode has its own shape frame that is custom-made by a carpenter. For example, Intermission has an octagonal frame, the control room in Episode 6: On Guard has a sliding window behind which an agent sits and Echo Chamber has a shape that resembles the visor of night vision goggles.
Dirk Hardy, Vivarium, Episode 6: On Guard, 2020, Rutger Brandt Gallery
“You're looking at a 1-to-1 representation of the gap I made in my set. You are literally looking into a world that is comparable in scale to ours.” This also means that the works are only made in one format. “If you inflate or shrink them, you lose the hyper-realistic aspect.” According to Hardy, this constant ratio has the added advantage that it causes the works to engage into dialogue. “By choosing a different subject in each episode and a consistent working method, I hope to show a kind of multiverse in which the stories, just like in the real world, exist parallel to each other and enter into dialogue with each other.”
Dirk Hardy, Vivarium, Episode 2: The Race, 2018, Rutger Brandt Gallery
Hardy's work is also relevant in terms of content, as it touches on topical themes. “In Episodes 1 and 2, I was still experimenting with format. Episode 1 is big while Episode 2 is small. From episode 3 on, there is social engagement.” Episode 3: Achilles (2019) is also Hardy’s first double portrait: we are looking at the ticket sellers of a fictional attraction, the VOC swing boat Achilles. Hardy comments, “Achilles represents the Achilles heel of Dutch history. It questions the Disneyfication of our colonial past, a past that continues to be glorified by hacking and mobilising the aesthetic. This could very well be a 17th-century double portrait, but it is a set of a VOC swing boat.”
Dirk Hardy, Vivarium, Episode 3: Achilles, 2019, Rutger Brandt Gallery
On Intermission from 2020, we see Hardy himself in a cocoon with a face mask. The reference to the pandemic is obvious. In his latest work, Hardy becomes even more personal. Episode 11: Echo Chamber (2023) shows YouTuber Red Pill Roy's bunker-like office. Dressed in battle gear bearing the UN logo (which is a flat representation of the Earth), he is busy propagating flat earth theories while his daughter blows bubbles in the background. "Unknowingly, she debunks his theories, because if the Earth were flat, blowing bubbles would be impossible." Because of her presence, the work is not only about conspiracy thinking, but also the example you set as a parent and the ideas you pass on to your children. Questions that become pertinent when you have just become a father.
Dirk Hardy, Vivarium, Episode 11: Echo Chamber, 2023, Rutger Brandt Gallery
Vivarium by Dirk Hardy at Rutger Brandt Gallery can be seen through 8 July
