08 april 2025, Flor Linckens
Last chance | Willem Besselink: invisible systems, tangible forms
In the exhibition 'Derived Structures / Afgeleide Structuren' at NL=US (Analysis) Art, Willem Besselink focuses on a barely visible yet distinctly perceptible feature of the gallery building: the gradual subsidence of its historic wooden floor. Through sculptural interventions, he makes this subtle slant visible, causing the space to appear to tilt. The floor becomes almost legible as a landscape. In doing so, Besselink not only sharpens the visitor’s awareness but also reveals how our surroundings are continuously shaped by systems that usually escape our notice.
Besselink investigates structures, patterns and rhythms embedded in the everyday. Not as a single overarching system, but as a layered accumulation of small, often imperceptible forces. By observing, recording and visualising these elements, he brings hidden mechanisms to the surface and gains a certain control over them. His installations function as instruments for recalibrating how we relate to space, time and perception. The artist views his work as a way of registering experience in its spatial and temporal dimensions. His practice encompasses installations, drawings and sculptures, ranging from minimal gestures in exhibition spaces to large-scale site-specific works in the public space. His work invites the viewer to move around it, to reassess their orientation. This approach aligns with a broader practice situated somewhere between sculpture, land art and data visualisation. The moiré effect also regularly appears in his work – an optical phenomenon caused by the overlap of two patterns, which suddenly creates a sense of depth, as if the structure begins to move before your eyes.
For this exhibition, Besselink worked with the existing pattern of the gallery floor. The grooves between the wooden boards were filled with wooden elements, rendering the gentle incline of the space into a sculpture. In doing so, the building itself becomes part of the work. What unites his oeuvre is the way it encourages visitors to look more slowly, more attentively. To reconsider their position in a room. To experience how perspective shifts with every step, and how even something as minor as an uneven floor can open the door to a new way of seeing. A drawing in black lines in the front room of the gallery presents a schematic rendering of the same floor, the same installation in another visual form.
In a video accompanying the exhibition, Besselink remarks: “As a visual artist, I'm really fascinated by patterns and systems—those that are apparent or also non-visible in everyday life. Every different location and every different moment is actually a specific stack of all sorts of smaller little systems and patterns that come together on that one specific spot. I'm interested in this, or fascinated. I'm really always on the lookout for where these different systems might fall into place. Once you go around the space, these systems might change, or the interlocking of these systems might change with every step you take.”
The exhibition also includes wall reliefs from the "Landvermessung" series, developed during a working period in Wartenburg, Germany. The terrain around an abandoned school building appears flat at first glance, but closer observation reveals a gentle undulation hidden beneath dense grass and shrubbery. To make these contours visible, Besselink placed wooden stakes in a one-by-one metre grid across a field of twenty by ten metres. Each stake protruded half a metre above ground level. He then stretched threads in red, blue and yellow across the tops, running lengthwise, crosswise and diagonally. The result is an airy, three-dimensional drawing that seems to trace the topography of the land.
Besselink’s "Concrete Crosses" are also on view in the exhibition. These concrete cross-shaped elements function as modular components for an ever-expanding three-dimensional grid. The work evokes an imaginary measuring tool designed to systematically chart the space it inhabits.
Besselink studied at Academie Minerva in Groningen, the Universität der Künste in Berlin and the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, where he graduated cum laude in 2006. He also spent some time studying mathematics at the Humboldt Universität, a pursuit that has left a lasting imprint on his thinking on topics like abstraction, systems and spatial logic. This academic background resonates in the methodical nature of his process, though his visual language remains grounded in sensory experience. His work has previously been exhibited at institutions including Kunsthal, TENT, Park, 38CC and the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles. In 2013, he was nominated for the Royal Award for Modern Painting.
