Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes

KEES GOUDZWAARD
Lightweight, 2009. Courtesy galery Zeno X, Anvers.
Photography : Peter Cox.
SOFIA HULTéN
Since moving to Berlin at the beginning of the present
century, Sofia Hultén has busily honed her recycling
impulses. She hunts out ready-made and used objects.
The objects that she works on are often themselves
objects from the toolbox and provide a first clue to the
conceptual nature of her work, namely her reflexivity.
The video Past Particles – The Found Toolbox (2010) is
a meticulous inventory. She lists more than a hundred
pieces of ironmongery from a found toolbox. They
are all individually filmed, each fragment appearing
different but giving no clue as to its use or function. The
Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment is the name of an
installation in which nine metal door and window grids
have been sawn into three horizontal portions and each
third then soldered on to two other sections to create nine
new, unequal window bays, hung at regular intervals.
When looked at along the axis of their alignment, the
grids seem to reappear as they overlay one another.
This simultaneously multiple and unitary view is a
metaphor for the alternating processes of expansion and
contraction described in the self-help manual that has
given its name to the installation.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1972 in Stockholm (Suede), lives and works in
Berlin (Germany).
Les Prairies's artists
Kees Goudzwaard's abstract painting has been fostered by various
different pictorial influences – from Dutch landscape painting to German
Expressionism by way of American Color Field Painting. He uses full-size
paper mock-ups to experiment with various compositions before beginning
to paint on his canvas. During the 1990s, he made a radical change. He
realized that the subject of his work was not the painted picture but
the mock-up image, which preserves intact the moments of doubt and
hesitation in his thought process. Like a musical score, it allows him to
arrange and superimpose layers of coloured paper or sheets of transparent
plastic which he fixes with adhesive tape – generally on the wall of
his studio. In a second phase, he paints an exact copy of the original
mock-up without, however, taking into account the reliefs and shadows.
Goudzwaard insists that his work is not an illusionist trick or a trompel'oeil
but simply the substitution of one reality for another. He replaces the
reality of his painting with the reality of his process. The canvas is both the
mental representation of a picture to come and a completely finished work
in its own right. Goudzwaard is exhibiting several pictures here, each of
which addresses a particular aesthetic question. Untitled (2000) is from a
period when he was thinking about Dutch Modernism. He was taken with
the idea of Modernism as a promise of something possible, a kind of silent
euphoria, and was attempting to give it a more private dimension. "This
picture is a statement of a mental space private enough for somebody to
want to inhabit it and feel at home in it."
F. O. tr. J.H
Born 1958 in Utrecht (Netherlands), lives and works around
Anvers (Belgium) and Reusel (Netherlands).
Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, 2011. Installation view.
Collection Konstmuseum of Malmö.
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