FRAMED
NICK HULLEGIE & MAARTEN JANSSEN
20. March - 30. April
For his second show at the gallery Nick Hullegie invited Maarten Janssen for a collaborative exhibition. In the mindset of an artist duo the works where crafted. Together they transformed the 58m2 of the gallery-space into an in-situ installation consisting of 4.524 drawings based on autumn leaves.
Living respectively in Belgium and the Netherlands, Hullegie and Janssen worked already together in former collaborations. They graduated together in 1996 at the Art Academy in Arnhem (NL) and their body of work contains visible touch-line, as well in concepts as in their sense of subtile humor in the way of seeing things. The installation in the gallery shows multiple drawings, jointly created as single works. This exhibition reveals the joy of a tangible shared experience, challenging the concept of individual authorship.
Searching for a starting point to this collaborative adventure, Hullegie & Janssen found in the drawing their communal cross-lines. The season of autumn with its walks in nature through thick layers of fallen leaves, generated the concept, structures you find in this natural disorder.
The piles of drawings from basic autumn-leaves, lying on the gallery-floor, refer to this natural disorder as an archetype of both artist's creative spirit; a controlled chaos providing new spaces of possibilities. Chaos and disorder becoming a study of order within a system that exhibits apparent randomness.
During the working-process Hullegie & Janssen invented their own rules of the game, that generated new rules. Questioning how to create new structures out of this randomness.
The total amount of 4.524 individual drawings represent the 58m2 surface of the gallery. Each paper-leave contains a drawing of one out of four basic tree-leaves. We recognize the oak-, the beech-, the ash- and the birch-leave. These individual drawings have been squeezed into paper balls that lie in piles all over the ground.
On their turn, the works hanging on the walls show us the traces that were drawn, layer by layer, of multiple amounts of paper-balls squeezed under the glass plates of the frames. The three dimensional objects becoming drawings again. Inviting to see through the chaos at first sight. If we look longer, tree-leaves show up throughout the playful structures of lines and colors.
Installation views
