Job Koelewijn
Higher Contradictions
Galerie Fons Welters - Back Space
11 Mar – 15 Apr 2017
LEARN MORE
In Job Koelewijn’s sixth solo exhibition at Galerie Fons Welters the walls are filled with contradictions. The words “Be More Specific” motivated a new series of monumental wall drawings, reminding of an eponymous work from 2006, for which Koelewijn printed this text on the wall with a large wooden stamp in green inhalation ointment. Wondering what would be its antithesis, he returned to this statement to arrive at an overview in which contradictions feel more complete together. In a special invitation card these incentives serve as a mould for the exhibition.
Text, in the broadest sense of the word, has always taken an important place within Koelewijn’s work. In the last years, stemming from his “Ongoing reading project”, literature appeared mainly in large drawings as aphorisms; short theses as “style is self-plagiarism” or “vision is the art of seeing things invisible”, which are, on closer inspection, harder to grasp than they appear at first sight. This time Koelewijn literally departs from duality, continuing on the gallery walls with citations like “opposition is true friendship” and “nothing fails like success”. “The idea of polarity is an important aspect of my work, and the more you think about it, the more fundamental and penetrative this becomes: day/night, high/low, hot/cold; notions that balance each other out.” Instead of being played off against each other, the textual oppositions in “Higher Contradictions” are balanced, provoking new insights.
With graphite and coloured pencils, these aphorisms have been drawn onto the wall, overlapping and slightly shifting, as the passing of time. This way visual circles arise, which are often a central element in Koelewijn’s work; like a mantra, a mandala, the work repeats and imprints itself. Because the original mint green templates will be shown with the drawings, Koelewijn emphasises their status as print. Addressing reproducibility, the moulds also point out potential; the infinite possibility for a new, a different work to arise.
Like the imperative of “be more..”, the drawings also speak to the beholder. Both bright and elusive, in concrete and vertiginous forms. What precisely do they tell us? Do we agree? Is it possible to unite such apparent extremes? Koelewijn states: “One of the tempting aspects of polarity is that it appeals to both the elevated and capricious aspects of the mind. Mondriaan has said the following: ‘[…] Nothing in the world can be conceived in or by itself; everything is judged by comparison with its opposite. Only in our time with its maturing and growing equilibrium between the inward and the outward, the spiritual and the natural, has the artist come consciously to recognize this ancient truth […]’.”
[Rosa Juno Streekstra]