For his debut solo exhibition in Amsterdam at Projectruimte 38/40, Doron Beuns presents a series of large-scale knitted paintings within an installation that includes lighting, video, sound, and scent. As with his previous work, Beuns plays on a hysterical post-digital world where perception is dictated by the position we adopt in relation to any given object or subject. Particularly with this presentation, Beuns encourages the viewer to experience the work from various distances, engaging all of their senses and observing how these variables shift our perception over time. Concepts such as good, evil, fear, hope, danger, security, friendship, hostility, decency, and transgression could all transform into one another within Beuns’ universe.
From up close the knitted paintings look abstract, innocent and somewhat domestic. However, from several meters of distance, we see various layers emerge in which enlarged portraits of his close friends have merged with absurd online search results, memes, scandals, controversial figures and significant moments from art history. The paintings depict the internet as an ‘open-source’ colosseum for unhinged free association. Beuns emphasizes how intensive internet use lays claim to our most primal desires and dark tendencies. According to Beuns “this is the sublime dimension of the internet in which the odd combination of noble, splendid and terrifying things become a contemporary form of beauty.”
This coexistence of contrasting moods have also informed the soundscape and scent that were especially developed for this show. The smells and sounds range from pleasant to eerie and there to bring attention to different aspects of the knitted paintings with each fresh look. Beuns is interested in the idea of allowing different works to interfere with each other through synesthesia; This is that Freudian thing where one thing you see, hear, or experience makes you involuntarily think of or sense something else. This also applies to the projection of pixelated hands that seem to be knitting at a very slow pace, shown next to an unfinished knitted fabric, that seem to suggest that the knitted paintings were slowly and lovingly made by hand. Beuns deliberately tampers with the evidence of his production process to encourage the viewer to carefully consider and reconsider every element in the show. In his words, “everything deserves reasonable doubt, it’s okay to be a little paranoid sometimes”.
