GALERIE VOSS

Jurriaan Molenaar | Fermate
Jan 18, 2019 - Mar 02, 2019

The Venetian architect and painter Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) monitored the excavations of antiquities in Rome with great curiosity. His rendering of ruins and sites was such that, even today, they provide us with a good deal of information about the situation at that time. Apparently, this work stirred his imagination for he started a series of etchings of imaginary dungeons and subterranean vaults already before 1750, the famous Carceri d’invenzione. In these etchings, Piranesi challenged the laws of perspective and realistic representation. He filled the sheet with arches, bridges, steps and towers, making it clear that the composition was merely a cut-out of a larger whole. Light and shadow play an expressive role of their own .The Carceri give a vision of labyrinthian catacombs that cannot possibly be reconstructed in a rational way. Jurriaan Molenaar (1968) picks up Piranesi’s technique by making the beholder an eyewitness of situations that are not easily accessible. A seemingly immeasurable space is represented on a flat surface, seen from an apparently unfathomable perspective. It is indeed recognizable. In the paintings of a few years ago, only the outside of a building was represented from a bird’s-eye view. Instead of facing a back¬ground, in these paintings you look down upon a ground exclusively made up of land and water. The building stands on a ground plate like a closed box of irregular shape. Nowadays the painter moves to a spot inside a building, making us experience the three-dimensional structure of walls, floors, door openings and windows from inside. With these interiors, too, he prefers irregularly shaped boxes with unexpected angles, mezzaninos and glass walls that confine a space physically but not visually. Characteristic of all the compositions is the absence of narrative elements. It is not one point in particular that catches the eye. The paint has been applied over the entire canvas with equal precision. This causes a tension between what the painter paints and what he omits. Jurriaan Molenaar is not concerned with expressing details. They distract from the representation of spatial illusion. Every act or incident, if it were only the idea that the building is not finished yet or that someone is about to arrive, is one too many. This principle offers openings to great visual richness. Molenaar’s picture choice is made while moving. With regard to the bird’s-eye perspectives this goes without saying. The painter has made balloon flights and round trips by plane and he has defied his fear of heights in order to master this picture language. The painted image can be nothing but a still, a split second from an infinite series of perspectives. When the artist is on solid ground, as we may assume is the case with the other compositions, what determines the picture cut-out and the vista is still the moving body, head or eye. The impression of the painting finally depends on wich moment was chosen to be frosen. For instance regarding the horizon, which is supposed to be straight, crooked or invisible in relation to the picture surface. Of equal importance at the least is the position of the wall spaces in relation to each other. Any person that has ever walked among high buildings will know how the perspective is distorted with every step he takes. This happens in exactly the same way in an inner space with vistas. Another choice regards the picture cut-out. What are the edges of the composition, and what is their effect on the degree of realism of the composition? Impressionist townscapes for the first time showed street scenes with a seemingly accidental cutting of the houses at the painting’s edge. Molenaar often does this in the wide, lying formats. The effect still is, just like with Gustave Caillebotte and Camille Pisarro, that the painting is suggestive of a run-on representation.(1) Jurriaan Molenaar shares with the impressionists a similar fascination with contemporary street scenes, although the outcome is hugely different. Molenaar travels a lot and the architecture that stirs his imagination is the universal construction with concrete, glass and plaster walls, which can be found from Cologne to Cape Town and from Chicago to Singapore. This worldwide spread causes that Molenaar’s motifs can be recognized everywhere and yet cannot be placed as a specific situation, found exclusively in a well-defined spot. For all his simplifying and stylising, Molenaar does not violate this conceivable reality. He sticks to the eyewitness principle, which means that he does not repre¬sent anything that cannot have been visible from the artist’s perspective at the time of painting. The advantage of this principle is that the beholder can imagine himself standing on the very spot where the painter was when he decided upon his picture cut-out.(2) Thus we get to the very crux of these paintings: fascination with space, suggested solely by colour on canvas. The painter may not overstep the borderlines of sugges-tion, for if he would retell the emotion he felt when he hit upon a usable image there would be nothing left but rude everyday realism and not the transparent piece of labyrinth coloured in grey light that we get to see now. What that labyrinth is composed of – constructions, materials and measurements – is left unresolved by the painter, and the beholder instinctively knows the answer. The fact that he is steered in this by the way colours alter in a seemingly monochrome surface, remains under the skin. It is in the play with light and shadow that, for the keen observer, the only inconsistencies occur in these otherwise so soundly based compositions. Here the painter demonstrates that he has been touched by the ‘other world’, when he learned how to paint icons in a Russian monastery in 1989. He writes about this himself: ‘This ‘other world’ had a number of striking rules; for instance, ‘reverse perspective’ was used, which made it possible to see from an object both the left side and the right side. And since the ‘other world’ itself was the source of light, it was represented without shadows. Besides all, I was intrigued by the stylised picture language.’ It is Jurriaan Molenaar’s ambition that the eye of the beholder keeps roaming inces-santly. That it is captured in his dungeons and never gets bored. 1. On the problem of the picture cut-out and the possible relation with photography, see: Kirk Varnedoe, A Fine Disregard, What Makes Modern art Modern, New York 1990, especially chapters 1, Near and Far, and 5, Overview: the Flight of the Mind. 2. On the eyewitness principle and the representation of movement and space on a plane see: E.H. Gombrich, Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye, in: The Image & the Eye, London 1999 (1982). ‘Walking around in a painting, I don’t want to stumble anywhere.’ ‘When I put a colour on canvas, it has to sink to its specific depth.’ ‘If a big, say concrete, wall is part of an image, I want its shape to be such, that I can read it as a motion instead of feeling its weight. Somehow I don’t like a dominating base.’ ‘I like working with a soft lightsource and an equally soft darksource.’