home <
Rutger H. Cornets de Groot
verschenen in het culuur maatschappelijk maandblad STREVEN(januari 2009)
A picture
of a lost image A
conversation about Paul Combrink's daily canvasses / Rutger H. Cornets de Groot Everybody
experiences events that stay with them for their entire lives, perhaps as a
happy memory, perhaps as trauma. In both instances that event creates a loss,
it disappears from time – but not from one's memory. Many artists try to bring
that moment back, to capture and record it permanently, to turn it into a
symbol. Think of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, or the New York
of Martin Scorsese's youth, or Gerrit Achterberg's dead lover. Paul
Combrink (Rotterdam, 1949) creates daily canvasses. Every day around noon, he
takes a photo, which he then prints onto a 50 x 50 cm canvas and covers with
numerous layers of paint, to create an entirely new image. He has been doing
this for a long time, and the size of his oeuvre is therefore impressive. When
I first visited an exhibition of his work four years ago, I wondered how he
would display the hundreds of paintings mentioned in the invitation into the
few smallish rooms of the Haagse Kunstring gallery. His solution was as
unheeding as it was brilliant: he covered the walls with them, and simply
stacked the rest. He created an architectural structure on the walls, while the
stacks, that only showed the sides of the paintings where the paint had dripped
down, became independent sculptures. These formations carried on the idea of
the original lost image, while a new visual experience replaced and symbolised
the image that had disappeared. back
<A
conversation about Paul Combrink's daily canvasses
In his
work, Combrink tries to reflect pop art breaking away from abstract art. Just
as Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, Combrink creates
art in which the image that inspired his work becomes unrecognisable. When I
present this parallel to the artist, whose background is in geometric abstract
art, he's surprised but doesn't deny it.
There are other characteristics that align with pop art: the oeuvre is large,
it combines different kinds of media and the canvasses have both base and
aesthetic elements. Though those last two aspects
shouldn't be seen in a negative light, the pieces don't give off a sense of
originality or uniformity, and even the attempts to renew himself seem to
happen within traditional paths. The artists isn't trying to portray himself as
a fictional entity in the field of visual art, but has in ways created a kind
of machine that operates using the information and qualities of that field: an
autonomous activity that brings something original and real to light in the way
that Combrink places that process in the here and now. At a more
recent exhibition, four years later and once again at the Haagse Kunstkring,
the emphasis had shifted to the inspirational sources and motives of the work,
rather than the creative possibilities of it. There was a room dedicated to the
photos that had been hidden four years earlier. These photos and also the
canvasses were now numbered, or to be exact: time-stamped in no less than
fifteen different calendars from Armenian to Jewish and Chinese to Julian. What
was a concept to begin with, is now concrete: the canvasses' history is no
longer a story, but a tangible part of them. It's almost as if that which the
pop artist within Combrink had erased, the archeologist within him is trying to
uncover from under many layers of paint, inside his own work. His
fetish or – depending on how you look at it – trauma is time itself: this
accumulation of everything that happens. The motto
of the second exhibition was a line by Vasalis: 'I dreamed that I was living
slowly'. It's from the poem Time, and the first three lines
are: I dreamed that I was living slowly... slower than the oldest stone. It was terrible [...] Slower
than the oldest stone: so slow, it seems, that all other matter is brought to
life, at least that which is transient. That's how alchemists viewed life:
There is a stone, a Philosopher's Stone, hidden in all matter; the trick is
finding it... Are the layers of pigment that Combrink covers his photos with
not prima materia, and is the photo not a picture of what is 'real' — of
an original but unfulfilled desire now that reality is no longer as she is, but
had become a symbol, which can only be expressed in symbols? I spoke to him in
his studio. Symbolic
order 'The poem
is about seeing things in their inertia,' Combrink says. 'There are two sides
to that. Life goes so quickly, but you also want to get a handle on it. You
can't control it, yet if you could, it might actually be really awful. Then
it'll be an entirely different experience, because you can't pause to consider
everything.' He had
installed a monitor with a digital clock in a corner of the gallery: it's a
number with ten figures and two figures after the comma – the time that has
passed since his birth down to a hundredth of a second. The last two numbers
changed so rapidly they were indecipherable. In a text
he wrote that accompanied the exhibition, I read: 'Today I took a photo at
12.01.57.4 hours. That is 1.827.228.717
seconds after my recorded birth. In one-sixtieth of a second I captured a
visual experience: the 109,633,723,020th part.' Accountability Why did
you show the photos this time, the sources? 'It all
starts and ends with the photos. There is no method more accurate to capture an
event than photography. Those photos are small pieces of an endless image in an
endless time. They represent a very small part of a large image, which also
includes other images. It is essentially one image; it is only the points of
view that are different. But it is one image. I now also add media releases,
because the moment is also connect to something that happens elsewhere: they
are related.' Combrink engages
his audience through this relationship. His daily photo accounts for a part of
his world, but he makes it accessibly by sharing it with others and making a
statement about it. One of those statements,
for example, is the Armenian calendar, which differs from the Jewish one, the
Chinese and Julian one, and eleven other calendars that are represented in his
work. In this way he comes to a super-personal point of view, an objectivity,
that does not strive for uniformity, but hopes to prevent his world from
excluding that of others. In this moment, someone is being shot in Afghanistan,
someone is being injected in America, someone is stepping onto a mine in Iraq,
someone is being deprived of their rights in the Netherlands. Combrink's work
implicitly takes all these events into account. Or, as
he notes in the text accompanying the exhibition: Hrant Dink was born
10-02-1403 in Malatya. He was murdered 07-07-1456 in Istanbul. All this is
according to the Armenian calendar. Hrant Dink was murdered on my 21.141st day.
It is important the Armenian calendar be included in my work. The fact
that Combrink takes a photo at the same time every day, proves that it's not
about the subject of the picture, but the act of taking that photo. The photos
represent consecutive snapshots of his life, which are thus declared art.
Taking these photos follows the Fluxus movement as it were, which is then documented. We are left with a symbol, that is modified
within a successive alternate reality, from photography to painting to sculpture
to installation. Yet, it's not so much the result (canvas, sculpture,
installation, in other words: the object) as the actual process (the assembly,
making time tangible) that shows traces of the reality that flows outside of
the pictorial order. Using a photo taken at a set time as a starting point,
Combrink's methods are consistent with a cinematographic, duration-based view
of reality. It's not the temporary (re)construction of the 'self' that's the
goal here, but allowing the flow outside of the object to enter, and the self
is secondary to that. In that respect, the sculptures, however anthropomorphic
their form may be, are manifestations of the flow of time.
There
were two installations at the exhibition: Cubic structures of which the floor,
walls and ceilings were made out of daily canvasses. Combrink called them
'brain rooms', reflecting the vast amount of images and memories that people
deal with and the way they are arranged in our minds. The sculptures, the walls
of paintings and the installations represent history: a history of 'becoming'
and a history of documentation. The anecdote is not completely erased, but it
builds up and presses on the mind: every day is accounted for, and these
reports take shape, they form bodies in the space. Nothing that we do – and
even when we're doing nothing, we are doing something, how else would time pass
– is without consequence, and that is, when we take into account the way these
works are created, immediately clear when you look at them. They 'are' time,
and thus they 'are' us, and we are looking at ourselves. Why do
you modify the photos so intensely? 'The
image will never stay as it was, regardless. You cannot capture its form. You
take the image and it starts to lead a life of its own. But I am also an
artist. I take physical action and carry it in time. What's more, I destroy it,
I literally take a knife to it. My daily canvasses are formed not just by
creative motives, but also destructive ones: destroying an image creates a new
image. This technique gives the work a physical sense, so that you're inclined
to scratch it. That's why I paint with pigments I mix myself, this makes the
colours more vibrant and it gives the work a tactile quality. But it's
important that I destroy the original image by covering it with another
image. Both, photo and painting, are images of lost images.'
As a creator, an alchemist, Combrink modifies the image, which is cut up, and over times gets entirely hidden by layers of paint, until only their story remains. Although... If you look very closely, you can sometimes see small remnants of the photo that instigated the piece under all the paint. That's how the image returns through the tactile: not in its display, not in history or in an idea, but in something you can touch: more tangible, more physical than any image, and so far from lost. This means that in the end, Combrink doesn't create conceptual art – and maybe even polemicises against it. All that remains is a symbol that takes a physical shape and re-establishes itself in the world. The image, that appeared lost, returns in a new, tangible form, as tangible as the world that was photographed initially – now no longer as a singular entity, but withdrawn from the chaos and incorporated in a symbolic order – as a picture of the lost image.
Publiced in culture social monthly magazine STREVEN
(januari 2009)
home < Rutger H. Cornets de Groot
verschenen in het culuur maatschappelijk maandblad STREVEN(januari 2009)
culture social monthly magazine STREVEN (januari 2009) |