Life seems to be led in a bubble of our own current fancies. This is true in the Netherlands, where I live, where my longstanding obsession with images of the descent from the cross and the last judgment are often put politely to one side.
Over the summer, I decided to throw out all my old papers and photocopies and paintings. My friends Paul and Dan rearranged them for me and added their own mark. The resulting works were shown – and remained – in Rotterdam.
The three new works somehow managed to have an air of the Baroque, and Northern Renaissance images I have long admired. Details of two are shown here in black and white. I wonder what’s going to happen when giving answers to everything stops being a going concern.
Photograph of a photocopy of a photograph of a detail of a work from the exhibition, “Hold on to the Paper”, Rotterdam, June 2017. The image (suitably apocalyptic and recreated by the curator’s friend Paul) shows old drawings and scraps and photocopies from the curator’s collection. Pleasingly, this image in particular looks like the plate from an old book on art history.
Photograph of a photocopy of a photograph of a detail of a work from the exhibition, “Hold on to the Paper”, Rotterdam, June 2017. The image (suitably apocalyptic and recreated by the curator’s friend Paul) shows old drawings and scraps and photocopies from the curator’s collection. The curator found he had an inordinate amount of petcare mail order catalogues from the 1990s in his collection.
Photograph of a photocopy of a dip pen and ink drawing showing an East African soldier from the First World War, an Askari, holding a modern tablet. Drawn in 2013 or thereabouts, the curator thinks this drawing symptomatic of his Leiden bubble.
