Category: art

Eileen Cowin’s earlier photographs seemed to belong to the genre of the domestic snapshot. They purported to be slice-of-life images of families at the dinner table, or couples conversing in the living room or the master bedroom. Just beneath the surface, however, was an element of artifice—a self-conscious pose or an odd disconnection between characters that subtly undermined the illusion of spontaneous intimacy.

In her new photographs, the theatrical element has been made explicit. Men in trench coats or nondescript suits and women in slinky red dresses posture against a deeply shadowed background, arranged in tableaux that seem derived from film or art history. Their gestures are broad and symbolic, the situations in which they find themselves suggest the conventions of film noir and their faces are frequently obscured by shadow, hair or hat, heightening the suggestion that they are meant to represent types rather than individuals.

Voyeurism is a recurring theme—several works feature figures peering from behind Venetian blinds. When the characters are not observing each other, they make it clear by their studied poses that they are aware they are being watched. At times, their deliberate, archetypal movements echo Kabuki theater. Like the film stills that these photographs imitate, Cowin’s images suggest freeze-frame shots from mysterious narratives. The work that offers the closest approximation of traditional narrative consists of four panels: in the first, a woman in a red silk shift peers through a Venetian blind; in the second, she stands with her back to us, holding a crumpled letter and staring at a telephone. The third image shows her again peering through the blind, this time in close-up, and the fourth presents what is apparently the object of vision: a man branded with the stripe pattern of the Venetian blind, rummaging through an unmade bed.

While Cowin’s earlier, domestic photographs focused on the terrors of familial intimacy, these new images crackle with sexual tension, even when the characters are all men. As in film noir, these tableaux suggest that the rituals of male bonding and competition are essentially a matter of pose. If women fit into this world at all, it is as glamorous and potentially dangerous objects of desire. Although Cowin inevitably celebrates such conventions, through her deliberately self-mocking artifice, she also challenges them. This is also true of the works that refer to art history. Cowin’s treatment of the odalisque as a television viewer, or her presentation of a veiled Magritte heroine before her painted representation, casts a sheen of absurdity over Western art’s tendency to objectify women. Cowin’s photographs are great fun, but they bear a hidden stinger.

gallery Min publication available at www.ftn-books.com

Among the recently acquired gallery Min catalogues I personally find the one on Jo Ann Callis the most intriguing.therefore I decided to place the interview I found with her in this blog:

Jo Ann Callis is a photographer based in Los Angeles. After graduating from CalArts, she began teaching there in 1976 and is still a faculty member of the School of Art’s Program in Photography and Media. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2009, the J. Paul Getty Museum presented a retrospective of her work in Los Angeles titled Woman Twirling. Callis has received three NEA Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In this interview, Jo Ann Callis opens up about how art kept her sane as a young mother in an unhappy marriage, the impact mentor Robert Heinecken had on her life and career, and her process when going on a photoshoot.

TGL: How was your childhood?

JC: I had a middle class upbringing in Cincinnati Ohio. My father graduated as an electrical engineer but later went into the furniture business and my mother was an elementary school teacher. My sister and I became the victims of sibling rivalry, and I developed a sense of competition because of it. Sometimes that can be beneficial because it can give one drive to succeed and a lot of times that can be uncomfortable and detrimental.

Art was in my life from age eight. I took art classes for kids on Saturdays at the art museum. Somebody said I was good and that is all I needed to hear. I found something I had talent for and which I loved so much. It gave me a passion for making things and studying art. I went to college for two years and then got married. A year later at 20 I gave birth to my son and we moved to Greater Los Angeles. I had another son two years later. At 22 I was ill prepared to take on my new roles in life and to be away from any family support. I was the mother of two sons when all I really intended was to be was an artist.

TGL: What was it like being a young mother in California? 

JC: I was a homemaker and mother of two with big responsibilities for such a young person, but I attended sculpture classes at night at a community college to keep my sanity. Art helped me get through those most difficult years. I was driven to find a way to emotionally survive and art did that for me since I was a young child.

TGL: Were you making art at the time? 

JC: Besides going to night school for art, I was making paper collages at home. That was the best I could do then. Making art at night school became my salvation, it was a place to feel whole and to have a little piece of life away from family a couple times a week, at least.

TGL: You got your degree from UCLA. When did you decide to go back to school? 

JC: In 1970 I decided I wanted and needed my degree. I was thinking about getting out of my marriage, but I didn’t even have a college diploma yet and wondered how I would support myself and the children. At UCLA, I finished my undergraduate degree and then did my graduate studies there too. In 1976, before I completed my 3rd year of grad school I began teaching part time at CalArts. It was crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing at all, but I had a job, even though I had only been using a camera for 3 years before I started teaching others. I was very nervous and insecure about that, even though I was 36 years old at that time.

TGL: You took classes with Robert Heinecken at UCLA. 

JC: He changed my life, because he supported and respected the work I was making. He is the one who recommended me to teach at CalArts. Without his encouragement, I don’t think I would have had the courage to go into photography. A few years later, he introduced me to my second husband, who recently passed away.

TGL: Was your husband a photographer too? 

JC: No, he was a wonderful artist will a huge imagination and a great sense of humor that he brought into his art.  He was playful and drew, painted, and made installations in the desert. His day job was on the Santa Monica Pier. He didn’t have a career in art, but he drew pictures until almost the day he died. Art sustained us both and it was a good marriage.

TGL: Your art is very surreal, but you are not a surrealist. How would you describe your process?

JC: When I made work, I started to think about ideas and how I could make pictures around those ideas or emotions. I wasn’t thinking that I was a Surrealist or how a Surrealist would do it. I was just following my intuition somewhat like free-association bringing me to something I could work on to express myself.  Perhaps that is why my photos can look surreal; they may not make sense logically, but I hoped there was an emotional intelligence in play.

TGL: Did you plan out your photoshoots or improvise? 

JC: I planned out my shoots, because I have to know what props I needed or what the model looked like and how to direct them to make the photo I had imagined. I would go to a location first just to become more familiar with where to set up my camera to make the picture I had in mind. When I converted my garage into a studio I started making all my photos in that space from then on.

TGL: How did you choose your models?

JC: They were mostly people I knew or friends of friends. I wanted them to look somewhat androgynous. I didn’t want bodies that were particularly one way or the other. They were not portraits of any individual person. They were not objects either because they were human beings that I hoped could stand-in for a person in general, not any one person. I love the relationships between the objects and what the objects conjure up in one’s mind. I enjoy taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar, showing it in a way that gives it a different importance.  

TGL: When did you get your first exhibition? 

JC: A friend of mine had scheduled a show at the “Woman’s Building” downtown. She couldn’t make the show for some reason and asked me if I wanted to use her space, which I did. That was my first exhibition in 1975. I also sent my work to competitions and got into many exhibitions that way.

TGL: You came up during a time when we didn’t talk about women artists the way we do now. How did you feel as a woman artist? 

JC: I just felt I was an artist and not a Woman artist with a capital “W.” It was the time of the Women’s Liberation Movement with the bra burning etc. right when I came into my own ideas on art-making. Feminism was very strong, and I got criticism because I often cropped out the heads of female models so we wouldn’t get involved in their identity. Critics saw it as treating women like objects. In a way I was, but not because I didn’t respect them. They were actors in a play. When you go to a play the curtain opens and you see the actors in the set. Everything is intentional; the setups in my photos are fabricated for that purpose. The pictures don’t look natural because they are metaphors for communicating a feeling, emotion or an unknown narrative. Just like in a play you never think the actors are living their lives on that stage, they are acting out some made-up drama.

TGL: Your work has a strong relationship to theater and mise en scene. Could you describe your creative process?

JC: First I think up some idea that excites and challenges me. I make sketches of how I want the photo to turn out. I organize what needs to be done to make that happen and shoot the picture.  

TGL: You are represented by ROSEGALLERY in Santa Monica, a gallery that specializes in contemporary photography. What is important for you in the relationship between an artist and gallerist? 

JC: I think it is trust, honesty, and respect for each other and what they each do that are the most important things in that close relationship. Each has an important role to play in getting one’s art out into the world for others to see and appreciate. It is essential that the gallery works at that goal, and it is important that the artist makes the art so each of them can survive. I adore Rose and her staff, I owe a lot of my success to them and their support of what I do besides their willingness to go the extra mile to make sure others can see it too.  

TGL: Who would you like to have dinner with that you don’t already know?

JC: I’d like to meet Georgio Morandi, a painter whose work I adore.

TGL: What advice would you like to give to The Genius List’s readers?

JC: Do what you are passionate about if you can while still paying the bills as you pursue your goals. I had no choice because making art was the only thing I really wanted to do. I thought teaching art was a way to satisfy that need to carry on in the only profession I was capable of doing well. It was worth the struggles because I have had a rich and fulfilling life so far.

The signed Jo Ann Callis catalog is still available at www.ftn-books.com

Robert Dawson has long been interested in how photography can be used to understand our relationship with the environment and the commons. He is also interested in photography’s ability to shape public awareness and understanding of the place we call home.

Dawson was recently awarded the 2018-2019 Fulbright Global Scholar award by the U.S. Department of State. Dawson’s photographs have also been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, an Artists Grant from the Graham Foundation and an Artists Grant from the Creative Work Fund. He has also received grant from a Visual Artists Fellowship from the National Endowment For the Arts, a Ruttenberg Fellowship from The Friends of Photography, a Photographer’s Work Grant from the Maine Photographic Workshops, a James D. Phelan Award through the San Francisco Foundation, and a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center For Documentary Studies at Duke University. He served as a Panelist for the Visual Arts Fellowship in Photography for the National Endowment For the Arts in Washingto, D.C.

Mr. Dawson’s photographs have been widely exhibited and are in the permanent collections of many institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art, (Smithsonian Institution) Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Center For Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris: and the Carpenter Center For the Visual Arts at Harvard University.

www.ftn-books.com hast he gallery Min exhibition now available.

Internationally known photographer and educator, Jack Welpott was born in Kansas City, Kansas on April 27, 1923, but grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. After high school he enrolled in Indiana University, but was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force in 1943. He served in the South Pacific as a radio intercept operator until 1946. After WW II, he returned to Indiana University on the G.I. Bill where he earned an M.F.A degree studying with Henry Holmes Smith. Jack and Jerry Uelsmann were the first M.F.A. graduates while Van Deren Coke was also a graduate student. During these years, he became acquainted with Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White all of whom were established photographers and pioneers in American photographic education.

Jack was hired in 1959 by John Gutmann, to teach photography within the Art Department at San Francisco State College, now San Francisco State University. He taught there for the next thirty-three years. When he arrived in San Francisco the Beat Generation was winding down in North Beach, however, he took advantage of the local poetry, jazz, art and culture. He also played jazz piano, which became a lifelong avocation. Years later he said, “When I’m working behind a camera, I feel like I’m trying to achieve something like a jazz musician does.” He also soon became associated with the local photographic community which included Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernard, Oliver Gagliani and Dorothea Lange.

At that time there were almost no photography courses or graduate programs offered at the university level anywhere in the United States. Jack pioneered in creating both photography courses and a graduate program. He also taught one of the first history of photography courses at the college/university level. While providing a solid basis in photographic technique, Jack always encouraged an appreciation of the master photographers. Also, he integrated the ideas of Carl G. Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, into the reading of photographs, especially dreams, symbolism and the unconscious mind. Jack’s educational goal was to determine the needs of the student, provide constructive criticism and help them develop their own vision. A number of his students have become major contributors to photography: Judy Dater, Leland Rice, John Spence Weir, Michael Bishop, Harvey Himelfarb, and Catherine Wagner among numerous others.

www.ftn-books.com has now the gallery Min catalogue available

For over 50 years, Misrach has photographed the dynamic landscape of the American West through an environmentally aware and politically astute lens. His visually seductive, large-scale color vistas powerfully document the devastating ecological effects of human intervention, industrial development, nuclear testing and petrochemical pollution on the natural world. His best known and ongoing epic series, Desert Cantos, comprises 40 distinct but related groups of pictures that explore the complex conjunction between mankind and nature. Otherworldly images of desert seas, rock formations, and clouds are juxtaposed with unsettling scenes of desert fires, nuclear test sites, and animal burial pits. Recent chapters capture the highly charged political climate following the 2016 US presidential election through photographs of spray-painted graffiti messages scrawled on abandoned buildings and remote rocky outcroppings in desolate areas of the Desert Southwest.

Other bodies of work include Golden Gate, a careful study of times of day, weather, and light around San Francisco’s famed bridge; On the Beach, aerial views of individuals and groups against a backdrop of water and sand; Notations, ravishing landscapes and seascapes in a reversed color spectrum; Destroy This Memory, a haunting document shot with a 4-megapixel pocket camera of graffiti found in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and Petrochemical America, an in-depth examination of petrochemical pollution along the Mississippi River produced in collaboration with landscape architect Kate Orff.

www.ftn-books.com has now the gallery Min/Tokyo catalogue from 1988 available

Robert Heinecken was born in Denver and raised in Iowa and California. He enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1951, then interrupted his studies to serve as a naval cadet and jet fighter pilot in the Marines. Heinecken completed a BA in 1959, and an MFA in design, drawing, and printmaking the following year, and was then hired by UCLA to teach a photography course. He began experimenting with the medium and also made the acquaintance of Van Deren Coke, Jerry Uelsmann, Ray Metzker, and Harry Callahan. Throughout his career, Heinecken has used photography as a medium for manipulation to explore his interest in content and form. His first important series, Are You Rea, published as a set of twenty-five prints, derives its title from the partial text that became visible when several pages of magazine advertising and text were layered over a light box and rephotographed. A thematic investigation of sexuality, the media, and the nature of desire has been a frequent undercurrent of Heinecken’s diverse body of work, which includes collage, montage, abstraction, manipulation of large-scale advertising and commercial imagery, and portraiture. Heinecken has taught at Harvard, the San Francisco Art Institute, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere. His work appeared in the landmark 1978 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960, and a major retrospective was presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2000.
Heinecken’s use of photographs and other images as raw material for manipulation represents a departure from the tradition of straight photography. While emphasizing the banality of the media, his work also suggests our collective responsibility in having perpetuated objectification and exploitation. An exploration of form without rigid formality, his puzzle collages of the mid-1960s allow viewers to move small mounted abstract photographs in prismatic variations, barely affecting their overall Cubist aesthetic.

. has now the scarce Heinecken 1986 catalogue for his Tokyo gallery Min exhibition available

Barbara Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey. Kruger briefly attended Syracuse University, then Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she studied with artists and photographers Marvin Israel and Diane Arbus. Kruger worked in graphic design for Condé Nast Publications at Mademoiselle magazine, and was promoted to head designer within a year, at the age of twenty-two. Kruger has described her time in graphic design as “the biggest influence on my work…[it] became, with a few adjustments, my ‘work’ as an artist.”

In the early 1970s, Kruger started showing artwork in galleries in New York. At the time, she was mainly working in weaving and painting. However, she felt that her artwork lacked meaning, and in 1976, she quit creating art entirely for a year. She took a series of teaching positions, including at University of California, Berkeley. When she began making art again in 1977, she had moved away from her earlier style into photo and text collages. In 1979, Kruger developed her signature style using large-scale black-and-white images overlaid with text. She repurposed found images, juxtaposing them with short, pithy phrases printed in Futura Bold or Helvetica Extra Bold typeface in black, white, or red text bars. In addition to creating text and photographic works, Kruger has produced video and audio works, written criticism, taught classes, curated exhibitions, designed products, such as T-shirts and mugs, and developed public projects, such as billboards, bus wraps, and architectural interventions.
Kruger addresses media and politics in their native tongue: sensational, authoritative, and direct. Personal pronouns like “you” and “I” are staples of Kruger’s practice, bringing the viewer into each piece. “Direct address has motored my work from the very beginning,” Kruger said. “I like it because it cuts through the grease.” Kruger’s work prompts us to interrogate our own positions; in the artist’s words, “to question and change the systems that contain us.” She demands that we consider how our identities are formed within culture, through representation in language and image.

www.ftn-books.com has some iconic Kruger publications now available.

This time a personal story by Folon himself:

During the war, we lived in Genval.

My father owned a house beside the lake. We spent our days fishing, with my brother. We used to go out on an old boat, although we couldn’t swim. When our school wasn’t closed because of the war, we learned French. My father explained the complicated words to us. The word ‘rhododendron’, for example. “I’ll show you”, he said. So he drove us out to La Hulpe. Standing in front of a magnificent bush of pink and white flowers, he said, “This is the garden of a thousand rhododendrons. They protect the Château de La Hulpe”. We couldn’t go in because it wasn’t open to the public. How distant and inaccessible it seemed there on its hill. It was surrounded by seemingly endless grounds. It was a place we dreamed about. The garden of a thousand rhododendrons and its distant château became the eighth wonder of the world for us during our childhood.

And the years went by. I became an artist. My career took me to France. The museums of the world exhibited my works to large numbers of people. I crossed the globe.

One day in 1970, I was invited to meet Paul Delvaux. The meeting took place at the Château de La Hulpe. It was wonderful to relive a childhood memory after so many years and to finally discover this place that I remembered so fondly. And to find an unknown painting by Magritte on the wall. He’d painted an ordinary morning in the countryside on the ground. And in the sky, there was the ground, like something quite normal. Something very ordinary had become extraordinary.
This unknown Magritte masterpiece and being on the terrace in the company of Paul Delvaux made it a truly magical place for me. We enjoyed the evening so much that we were invited to stay the night there.

The next day, I spent the morning wandering around the park. It was one of the most beautiful mornings of my life. The classicism, the sense of proportion and the harmony of the place made a deep impression on me. The grounds and paths must have stuck a mysterious chord with me. When we left, we took the path which leads to the park entrance. It took me right back to my childhood.
From that moment on, the place became part of my life.

Jean-Michel Folon

www.ftn-books.com has some scarce publications available.

gallery Min in Tokyo / Japan was one of the first locations where modern and contemporary photography was presented in Japan. Callis , Dawson and Cowin among the photographers presented. www.ftn-books.com has acquired some important and beautiful Min publications from the Mid Eighties which are now available.

Born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1946, Philippe van Snick is the perfect example of what is referred to as an ‘artists’ artist’. He is smart, sensitive, multidisciplinary, apparently not yet recognized by the establishment, still admired and respected by the connoisseurs who are familiar with his work. This year he received the Flemish Culture Prize for Visual Arts. It came to him after his comprehensive retrospective exhibition at Grazer Kunstverein Graz and at De Hallen Haarlem (both in 2016), and at the M – Museum Leuven (2010). Through this interview, conducted in his Brussels’ studio, CFA shares a glimpse into the artist’s practice.

Were you trained as a painter?

I was trained as a painter in Ghent. Though ‘trained’ is a big word, because in 1965 the Royal Academy in Ghent was rather old-school and there wasn’t much dynamic in it. I had a teacher in the first year who was a drunk man. He didn’t teach anything. You had to do it all by yourself – even to research what was going on in the art world. In fact, it was the end of a 19th century academic system. In 1968, at the end of my studies, the entire system changed. At that time, when I was about 20 years old, I already had a connection with Antwerp, which was (and still is) a very interesting city in many ways. For example, there was a gallery called White Wide Space that was connected to Germany and to the international scene of Conceptual artists, like Carl Andre, Bruce Nauman and the American wave. I would go to openings in Antwerp and experience what was happening. Also in Ghent there was some kind of dynamic in the actual art movements.

How was the art scene in Belgium then?

Well, there were some people, just a few people, who really supported the contemporary art, which at that time was only showed by a few galleries. There were no contemporary art museums either. In 1970 Antwerp started with ICC (Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, as of 1987 incorporated to form M HKA) as a public centre for contemporary art. In 1975 Ghent opened its Museum for Contemporary Art (Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, later S.M.A.K). This was due to the pressure of cultural associations, art collectors and personal initiatives.

And after you left the Academy, in the late 1960s and throughout the next decade, you detached yourself from painting. What influenced you to experiment with other medias?

Belgian artists, especially Flemish artists, were very interested in Expressionism. We also had an Abstract school, but that was not considered as interesting or important. When I left school this Expressionism didn’t interested me at all. I was highly influenced by artists and movements from abroad, such as (Marcel) Duchamp, Minimal and Conceptual art. In Belgium we had the Surrealist movement as well. This mix of Abstract, Surrealist, Minimal art and Conceptual has been my matrix until nowadays. De Stijl was somehow an influence too, but particularly Georges Vantongerloo. If you do some research you will see that his work was part of De Stijl, but was completely unique. It was more poetic. And he used personal mathematic formulations to title his works. People at De Stijl were rather dogmatic but he wasn’t.

On the mathematic note, can you tell a bit about your 0 – 9 system?

I had a friend who was passionate about Mysticism, and we discussed a lot, amongst other things, about dualism. In dualism, there are two parts, one of which revolves around the other to finally coincide. After they are together they explode in a multiplicity. That was my view of the universe. The question was, ‘how can I make this complicity concrete?’. So I decided to look at numbers from zero to nine. Ten numbers and infinite possibilities of combination. That’s the base where I started from to create and develop my work. In 1979, I started using colours. Each number was assigned a colour: zero: red, one: yellow, two: blue, three: orange, four: green, five: violet, six: black, seven: white, eight: gold, nine: silver.

Then how did you came about to be majorly a painter? Was it a smooth shift, something like a long time coming, or was it an epiphany, to reconnect with canvases?

It was in the late seventies. At that time there was a new dynamic in the art world: the Italian Trans-avant-garde, the Neuer wilden in Germany, the Punk movement, the New wave… And I thought, ‘I want to work with colour’. My first series of works were made with gouache, due to the brightness of the material. After that I started looking at the real paints, which had that same brightness and colours. From that moment I started painting with the help of my internal engine of 0 – 9, a kind of infinite dynamic movement that grounds my practice.

It’s an interesting transition, because in the 1970s there were no colours involved. The numbers came before, correct?

Yes, the first things that came out with numbers were wire drawings, sculptures and photographs. The first experience with colour was in fact a physical experience. I was sitting underneath a sun-umbrella that was orange, and the atmosphere, from that point of view, looked orange. That was really fantastic. This physical experience was the start of my use of colour. Bringing colour into my system allowed me to go further in my investigation of possibilities. Another question was: ‘how things happen in nature? Is this a possibility?’. When you mix things to see what will emerge from it. Take the hybrids, for example. In the plant world hybridisation is common. I often try to make a parallel between nature and painting. Although this ‘orange’ experience drove me to paint, I never wanted to explore colour through projections or artificial props. My personality counted in that decision: not to expose myself too much. To be more a kind of researcher than exposer. I asked myself: ‘how can I use painting as an artist?’. My formal education came back and all the tradition with it.

What about the dualities, for instance in the series ‘Day and Night’?

The theme of Day and Night (duality) came in 1984. I asked myself how to frame the colours between day and night. Day and night is also a new interpretation on my first idea (hard and soft) about duality. In 1969, I made ‘Traditionele L-vormige kamer’, an example of hard and soft: a steel cage and a cotton cage one next to the other. The ‘Day and Night’ is an on-going series, always black and blue with variations on my ten colours between one installation and the other.

You have been photographing since the late 1960s – though your first comprehensive exhibition of photographs, with several never before seen pictures, only happened in 2006 (‘Undisclosed Recipients’ at De Garage, in Mechelen, Belgium). Do you continue to photograph? If so, what’s the role of this media in your practice?

Yes I do. Each time when I come to a city that I’ve never been, I visit first the Botanical garden. I like to make botanical series. Later in my studio I make colour compositions on top of the picture to produce a series.
I also register my studio activities, digitally and on Polaroid.

In the catalogue of this exhibition you are quoted as saying, ‘(my artistic practice) is fundamentally about the instability of the material (…) it is always about the agency of things’. Could you please expand on this affirmation?

Here we can go back to the explanation about dualism. It is a constant movement of attraction and repelling. My interest in the fundaments of nature brought me to read about quantum mechanics. Agency of things is to make proposals readable, is to put the object(s) of your proposal on the right spot in a given space.

You clearly have a long term interest in mathematics – as it can be seen first with the ellipse drawings, then the dual system and finally in the 0 – 9 system. Have you ever thought about becoming a mathematician?

I never had the idea to become a mathematician. The intention to make the ellipse drawings was to register the development of an object from scratch and this in a series of drawings. The best way to register was to use the mathematical language. The 0 – 9 system that I developed is essential for the dynamic in my practice. I use the mathematical language as a way to express my view on the fundaments of my practice.

You operate a lot in the space, with site-specific installations and projects. And it becomes not only about the work being in the space, but the space becoming the work and the visual experience of colour. A more sensorial dimension to the work. After exhibiting in so many places, is there a place where you would really love to exhibit and haven’t done so yet?

My work can be installed anywhere. www.ftn-books.com has currently de Lakenhal catalogue from 1994 available.