Sam Hersbach, Ogen en Parels (150 x 95 cm), 2018.
Press Release, November 2021
Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen (DK), Ayesha Ghaoul (GB), Maxime Favre (CH), Helene Norup Due (DK), Sam Hersbach (NL), Andrew Joseph Long (USA) & Dionysios Argyropoulos Ioannou aka Dynno Dada (GRE).
For our second exhibition, we have invited a group of artists to engage with each other in the show Act II: The Observatory. The focus is artists that in one way or another act as magnifying glasses within their own range, the artists here peek from both directions: magnifying and reducing depending on the position we choose to partake in. It seems there is an engagement with the realm questioning fact vs. fiction.
Opening: Friday the 19th of November, 2-8pm.
Performance: November 19, 5pm: Dionysios Argyropoulos Ioannou aka Dynno Dada.
Exhibition period: November 19-28, 2021.
Opening hours: Tuesday-sunday: 12-6pm.
Andrew Joseph Long (1996, USA) deals within his work to develop a process of creation: the output is two dimensional media. He considers himself a visual researcher, a passenger of the world. The mode of creation is site-specific: it exists in tandem to his own process to stabilize and become ‘who I am (wherever I am)’. Long’s process incorporates reflection and accumulation to further creativity, the production of art becoming a methodology of emotional, visual, and physical recycling.
Helene Norup Due (1994, DK) researches different modes and mediums through which fictional narratives can be attributed to the life of strangers and incidents happening around her. Consisting of enigmatic portrait drawings and paintings of eerie figurations that ever so slightly prop out and away from the canvas and into the physical world. Exploring how fantasy can exceed the threshold of intimacies, usually quite small-scale imagery confronts us with to what extent we are comfortable fantasizing. Norup Due filters through her own sensory apparatus, picks out and invites us to look at people, situations and colors that have caught her attention while juxtaposing them into new stories of odd specificity.
The physical frames of her paintings partly consist of materials and utilities found around a rural household and thus the works hold shapes that look like steering wheels, cutting boards, cabinetry wrought with sincere intention. Using these recognizable ingredients to form her objects enables Norup Due to break through the wall of the logical world as we experience it, ultimately questioning at what pace we enter the reality that mainstream culture produces as the arena for our lives and visions.
Dionisis Argyropoulos Ioannou (a.k.a Dynno Dada, b. 1994, GR) is a body identity performer and a maker. Observing on the daily, they develop stories through the use of voice within an object-oriented performance practice. Parallel to their studies in Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Dynno’s drag was born in the underground fetish community of Amsterdam, as part of the House of Hopelezz. Character formation and identity politics nurture their costume study.
As an ode to seamstress grandmothers, Dionisis has founded ‘Maison Jaja’, a costume production house researching the intertwining of tradition, heritage, gender and culture. Dynno’s dilettante and transparent approach to art aims at bringing peoples’ own vulnerabilities into play.
Maxime Favre (1991, CH) is a painter and through his choice of materials and subject matters treat painting as an intrinsically extractive medium, ranging from the basic sourcing of pigments to its present and historical role as an exchange commodity. His expression draws on botanical and anthropomorphic references, where figurative entities approach each other in variations on the theme of corporeal and metaphysical parasitism. By examining the fundamental substances used in oil painting, both synthetic and natural, the works function as analogies for the domination of resources, or the subjection of nature itself.
Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen (1996, DK) is primarily a painter and with a palette that is focused on color-play and fields, Daniel tries to translate stories from a personal starting-point to a fictional imagination-world. Shaded by humor, Daniel tries to incorporate serious themes such as heritage, longing and nature.
Ayesha Ghaoul (1994, GB) works with drawing and installation. Her practice exists in a limbo between the real and the imaginary world, where she (re)negotiates the narration of the stories that surround her. Her points of view are multiple. Ayesha says: ‘Sometimes I sit in the front row of the opera house and I can see from my chair the spit coming out of the singer's mouth; other times I have really thick glasses with blue and red lenses, it’s blurry, the noises are enhanced. I feel sick.’ Her practice seems like an absorbent net of drawing, installation work, black and white scribbles and men with chastity belts flying around a room; where, in vain, things try to understand how to let materials communicate with their space, their context and their history. Narratively moving through different moments of time. Her practice becomes a way of spending time, killing time, wasting time. It’s a bored, nostalgic and lonely soldier, half lamb/half human; no mother tongue, that fights against the voices that claim that factual and objective narratives are the only ones we should see and the only ones we should remember.
Sam Hersbach (1995, NL) in his outlook and painting practice, is fascinated by the world that surrounds us, by it's apparent trivialities and by correlations that at first glance do not appear to be connected. At the beginning of his process, there is often one thought which suddenly proliferates into a hundred. Sociological and technological developments, especially with underlying philosophical considerations, form the core of his work. Painting is a process that filters and develops thoughts further, sometimes bringing them to a conclusion and over the last two years, Hersbach has created a sheer number of paintings that reflect this process. Various series, different styles, abstractions, figurations, reality and fantasy: such is the scope of the artist’s oeuvre that only a selection can be exhibited at a time. In this way, very different narratives can be constructed, and varying styles can be highlighted.
In his drone paintings, unmanned airborne vehicles take on a threatening position as both a technological innovation and as the controlling authority of the present day, developing from a toy to an aggressive, independent, sexless being. His mountain pictures, on the other hand, are almost romantic, telling of a young Dutchman’s longing to see high mountains. Hersbach himself, as a painter, is always at odds with painting and the myth that surrounds it. We find this struggle and it's processing in his paintings that oscillate between the micro and the macro. Sometimes his canvases are multi-layered, colourful and complex in their narrative, with an all- encompassing ambition that we recognise from great historical paintings. In other, smaller- scale works, he does exactly the opposite, zooming in on details that somehow have managed to isolate themselves and take centre stage.