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Rutger H. Cornets de Groot

  

 publiched in culture social monthly magazin  STREVEN(januari 2009)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 verschenen in het culuur  maatschappelijk maandblad  STREVEN(januari 2009)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A picture of a lost image

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    A conversation about Paul Combrink's 'day-canvasses'

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. 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.

          
     Stacking                                            
Sculpture by stacking

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.

         
      Self portrait                                

'Time is very fleeting,' Combrink says. 'My work emphasises the relativity of it exactly through that desire for accuracy. It isn't actually exact, and neither is that calculation: they are all flawed methods to measure the passing of time. Through my work, I show how futile it is, but you can only do it by doing it actively. This adds a sense of madness. Because everything is so essential, but at the same time, exchangeable. Time just speeding on and on like that on a monitor is a strange experience. That is my time that's flying by on there. On the other hand, it's a bizar thing to say that time passes quicker the older you get: my time perhaps, but not all time.'

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.'

'They are absurd, incomprehensible numbers,' Combrink says, 'that represent one-billionth of one's life, as well as history itself. I have calculated it all in fifteen different calendars. They each start at a different moment – I've chosen my own life as the starting point. So there is a sense of nostalgia there.'

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.'

         
     Daily moment; 6-3,5 meter            counting time 

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 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.

Revelation

There were two installations at the exhibition: Cubic structures of which the floor, walls and ceilings were made out of day-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.

         
       Brain room I: 2 bij 2 meter        II: 3.5 bij 3.5 meter

'What I wanted to demonstrate... In certain ways everything is so essential, while at the same time, nothing really matters. That's why I think those lines by Vasalis are such a revelation. If you were to live as slowly as in the dream in that poem, then it wouldn't be so replaceable. Life would be reduced to a photo, to a still, eternal image. Then everything that happens – but really only one thing is happening: a single, endless observation of a multitude of events! – would be of incredible importance. That digital clock, that speeds away from my birth at a breakneck speed one hundredth of a second at a time, proves how ridiculously unimportant everything really is. It goes so fast you cannot even read the numbers. On the other hand: maybe that's not even that far removed from the situation it Vasalis's poem, because if even stones move according to her experience, the rest must go as fast as that clock shows.'

   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 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.'

         

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.

 
       Rutger H. Cornets de Groot 

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Rutger H. Cornets de Groot

  

 verschenen in het culuur  maatschappelijk maandblad  STREVEN(januari 2009)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

culture social monthly magazine STREVEN (januari 2009)