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Rutger H. Cornets de Groot
verschenen in het culuur maatschappelijk maandblad STREVEN(januari 2009)
A picture of a lost
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A conversation about Paul Combrink's 'day-canvasses' Paul Combrink (Rotterdam, 1949) creates daily
canvasses. He calls his daily canvasses: 'day-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.
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. 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.
'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.' The focus of his work is not a singular symbol, but
an entire symbolic order: the agreement that humanity has moved on a second, a
minute, an hour or a day after x amount of time. Combrink then projects this
order, which is by definition the order of the 'Other', onto himself, and uses
his day-canvasses to track how many tenths and hundredths of a second he is
removed from the official – that is to say, according to this Other – recorded
and registered time of his birth. This means that the anchor point of his
project cannot be entirely certain, but it cannot be disputed, because it is
part of a discourse that was here before him, and will be here when he is gone. 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.'
'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 rhese 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 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 day-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.'
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