my graphic art on Modern Abstract Art online
The objects, part 2
Freedom of the visual image
It is because of the objects Hilly van Eerten uses in her graphic art that I am strongly reminded of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstamm, and his plea for the freedom to move words within a poem. He realised he could only create poetry by allowing the words in his mind to do their own thing. He saw words as abstracts that exist independently of the thing or being they indicate. The word ‘rose’ is not tied to the rose it indicates because the word may also be indicative of a girl called Rose, or even a beautiful thought with that name. The word ‘rose’ is free to roam and play with other words. To Mandelstamm, however, the word doesn’t entirely free itself of the object, because it remembers the object and returns to it now and then. There is a sort of love bond between the word that remembers where it came from and the object itself.
The relationship is never completely severed. What goes for the word, also applies to visual images. Visual images have also liberated themselves from the objects they depict and have gained the freedom to roam in that same way. The question is, do they roam around completely devoid of meaning or are they still connected to the objects they It is because of the objects in the came from? Is there any meaning left?
In Hilly van Eerten’s work we note the irrefutable presence of objects, the street brick, the roof tile, the fishnet. In their characteristic being, as well as in the structure in which they occur within our world. In spite of this the constant pushing and shoving in her work gives the street brick back its freedom of movement. As the word does in Mandelstamm’s poetry. The image of the baked brick may wander, in a poetic sense; it may start dancing before our eyes, creating all sorts of new connections and associations. The image may, for instance start dancing with other images in the digital imaging we are confronted with on a daily basis, or with the images of modern film, in which their freedom is fully utilised. This is how images, used in van Eerten’s work, enter into new connections andcombinations. They play hide and seek among the layers of her prints and play a game of references. Everything plays out in front of us: where is the front? Where the back? Which is inside and which is outside?
Is it still a tile or is it a roof that we’re looking at from above? Has it become a weapon, a sickle? Can we look into it or only at it. Her prints seem to hallucinate kaleidoscopically before our eyes, if we are prepared to look inside, we look into a shifting, circling microcosm, a tight knit world of images, figures and shapes. Sometimes she stretches things to their limit and tests how far she can take it.
The Limit
Where does the print stop making sense? Is there a limit? Is the cohesion of the print still based on meaning and content or has it turned into a game of aesthetics?
The boundary between where the material remains or is no longer a memory is apparently very clear and very delicate. It seems to be one of the goals in van Eerten’s work, but she only discusses it in images. She does not use words but allows the objects to speak for themselves. Where do the objects completely lose their visibility?
Where are they just visible? She moves along a razor’s edge because she definitely does not want to lose intelligibility altogether. Her choice of firm, intransigent materials helps her accomplish what she wants.
After all, they are things that people have known for ever, no matter what part of the world they live in.
To Hilly van Eerten they are anchors, limiting somewhat, the anarchistic movement of the visual roaming. We keep feeling the roof tile in its image. The structure of the pavement and the cobblestones are tangible to our eyes; as are the fishnets with their tatty ropes. We experience their fabricated-ness as we look at them.
The structures, van Eerten consciously uses and varies in her work, remain palpably connected to their stone or fishnet origin. That is the truth of her work; a kind of rubberstamp by which her work can be identified. In spite of her constant and extreme abstracting (from), stripping down and de-boning of images, she is still portraying them. She keeps reminding us of the materials the image is made of. In that there is hardly any imagination in her work. For as we look our feet remain on solid ground. I suspect Hilly van Eerten is constructing a modern mythology of materials, an attempt to carry basic elements from the earth and human history over to the world of modern visual language. She intends to create visual languages and shapes for materials that can participate in today’s world.
She effortlessly competes with digital adaptation, but to date, her work is physical. She shifts, cuts and pastes, varies grain and grid, dampens down or stretches out. Bringing out highlights or pushing images into the background. These are the old methods that have been developed since Seeghers’s time. There is a reason I mention his name. He too utilised the simple basic materials from daily life. They somehow found their way into his work, keeping his exuberant lust to experiment, within limits. What is it that tempts artists to reshape and taint the solid existence of these basic tools? Such as Raveel’s garden fence? Or the cubists’ vases? It may be because the familiar things in daily life show the freedom of the ‘visual image’ so well. The vase, the guitar, Franz Marc’s horses.
We view Hilly van Eerten’s work as a recreation of the fabricated materials in visual images.. The physical transformation that turns clay into brick or iron into a manhole cover is repeated by her, on paper. The visual image however, escapes straight away through the chimney stack. On paper the image returns in the shape of a bird, greeting its origin.
Fons Heijnsbroek.
© Translation, Emmy Muller, September 2008.