Tom Claassen
Rocky Lumps
Galerie Fons Welters - Back Space
4 Sep – 6 Oct 2004
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Galerie Fons Welters kicks off the new season with a solo exhibition by sculptor Tom Claassen (1964, Heerlen). Claassen lives and works in Denmark.
Claassen's work is emphatically versatile, in terms of subject, technique, and choice of material, but always recognizable. All of his sculptures embody a paradoxical tension between the light tone in which he approaches his subject matter, and the rounded, obese way they are shaped. Over the past years, his work has developed in the direction of the subjects' interior, formally speaking: where before their existence was caracterised by a struggle with their own bodies, their own physicality (as if they were wearing a couple of winter coats at once, unable to shake them off), the more recent sculptures are constructed with the same elementary forms (cilynders, cubes), but focusing more on the underlying structure than outside appearance.
The installation that Claassen realised at Fons Welters clearly shows this development. The sizeable work, that uses the entire gallery space, is quite abstract, at least at first sight. Big pebble-like shapes are spread out through the gallery, forming a loose grid - as if a dinosaur skeleton pierces the gallery floor from beneath. The pebble-shapes are all different in size, and more or less follow the build-up of the gallery's architecture: in the center, under the highest point of the space's light roof, is the highest island. Claassen's installation is a sculpture, but a location at the same time - like islands of eroded rock in the sea.
[Xander Karskens]