Fleur van Dodewaard (1983) describes her creative process as a constant quest for a language, a visual language, that does not yet exist. She states: ‘By the time you grasp it, you have internalized it to the point it dissolves, and you have to start anew. It must always be slightly different. You must always start again.’
This endlessly morphing visual language moves in sync with life itself. A life that cannot stand still, assume a fixed form, or be tamed. One where there’s always a new ‘now’ in which everything feels different and relates to each other in a new way. The language accompanies the artist on her journey. It moves, reflects, confirms, brings both freedom and obstacles, love and pain, challenges, and surprises.
‘When you create a work, with your body in the studio, your hands in the material, you are always fully in the here and now. You are completely open. Over the past year, I have been very aware of this and focused on it. The works you see in this exhibition are the result of this, of this moment. I wanted to think less and work intuitively, find freedom in doing. When you consciously push the chaos of the day into the background for a moment, concentrate on your body in the moment, and work from improvisation, from your hands, from the material, different things emerge. It’s about surprising yourself and the other anew. You also bring with you everything you have seen and experienced in art and beyond, it’s within you. How you relate to those existing forms in your own way, you find in the work. Something similar is possible when you view artwork in an exhibition. A poetic space emerges within yourself. You can always seek that; it’s not reserved for art. My wish is to always be in that ‘now.’
In the exhibition “TODAY TOO I EXPERIENCED SOMETHING I HOPE TO UNDERSTAND IN A FEW DAYS,” you can see works in the form of objects, created with oil paint on canvas. You could call it painting, but the approach to the ‘prepared Brussels linen’ is physical. They are all variations of elementary interventions in the material. They have been cut and incised, avoiding precise rectangles, with small holes, and the cadmium yellow and red, viridian, violet, and ultramarine are applied so thinly that you can see through them. Everything is flat and directly applied to the wall with nails.
The canvas works are interspersed with porcelain objects on the wall and in the space. The two mediums engage in a dialogue. Despite the significant difference in materiality and appearance, they mirror each other and stem from the same process. The porcelain sculptures are thinly rolled, cut, folded, and glued pieces of the snow-white Limoges material. They were created during an artist-in-residence at the European Ceramic Work Centre earlier this year. Both materials, canvas and porcelain, have been minimally manipulated.
Van Dodewaard: ‘In my work, I always try to make a small movement. An apparently insignificant gesture, like a simple line on a sheet of paper. I make that line and say: ‘it is you and me.’ I try to balance on the point where nothing becomes something; something becomes nothing. Searching for that single intervention that is just interesting enough, feels just right. It’s often harder than moving a lot. I am naturally drawn to it. Where you might think there is nothing to see. Where it all happens exactly.’
The artist thus continues her entirely unique way of working, which she long applied using the medium of photography, in painting and ceramics. She says about this: ‘With photography, I could do things that couldn’t be done elsewhere. It’s a world of its own that I have completely made my own. But I used painting as a standard reference and always longed to leave photography out. I have now succeeded in that. Working in the studio with the material is a very physical matter, and in the photograph of the object, a distance to that reality emerged. That was also part of the game. But now I don’t want that distance anymore. At least not for now. I want to present the material I have worked with my hands in the studio in the exhibition space.
And finally, the title. It is a sentence from the short film “Det Perfekte Mennesske / The Perfect Human” by Jørgen Leth from 1967. Fleur: ‘This beautifully stylized, poetic film explores what ‘the perfect human’ would be. This theme resonates within me. It is against the backdrop of the big existential questions that I create my work. My work is actually an attempt at an answer. – Because life, how do you actually do that?’