Time
is one of those defining concepts that seems clear until you start to
think about it. For O.J. Simpson, time relates to proof, to alibi, to
innocence – or guilt. If you’re Julia Kristeva, time is defined by
its cultural properties, about cycles and monumentality, about linear
history and the push towards eternity. In Clea van der Grijn’s
project, time touches all those characteristics and still leaves room
for exploration: time is a force to be reasoned with and examined,
all the more to confound you by its refusal to be pinned down.
Van
der Grijn’s question seems simple enough: Is there a relationship
between emotional time and measured time? Are human experience and
pain so ordered as the rational divisions of a calender? Do mind and
body proceed along parallel lines, or is REAL LIFE spiked with the
tension caused because the two can seem so incompatible? From a
visual perspective, the works choose a form that values order and
arts traditional mind-set, but up close, the canvases and paper
surfaces thrive on disorder, on cuts and scored markings, on
emotional pleas at odds with the regularity and apparent coherence of
their presentation.
Van der Grijn locates her inquiry over
three constituent works. The large painting INCISION examines the
expressiveness of traditional aesthetic dimensions: the 365 – part
anti- sequence A TIME uses various paper fragments with their own
innate symbolic sources to measure pain and exorcism; the mixed-media
65 part NEVER LOVED foregrounds text and language, communicating
through sight and touch with the support of three- dimensional
braille. Read as a whole, the three part project converts to a
meditation on relationships, on the contradictions between loving
ones self and loving another, on attempts to quantify experience from
the perspectives of art and of hindsight.
the messages seem
unequivocal; ” i never loved you i only needed you i needed you
to love me so that i could leave you” says NEVER LOVED. “cut
me with a blade all the hurt at once then go” says INCISION, its
planes themselves cut up, wearing language like battle scars- “skin”,
“tongue”, “saliva”- all made precise by dates.
But language scrambled in NEVER LOVED, its planes emerging from a
handwritten web of private letters, messages puckered by printed text
and given a palpably physical presence by the sculptural qualities of
the braille. Different word groupings leap out from the background,
their sense signifying different interpretations and messages,
fragmenting even further all attempts of understanding.
Scattered
through the series A TIME are the remains of victorian engravings
about head, heart and locations of bodily organs – reminders of an
age which believes that science could explain everything and ended up
being destroyed by the consequences. Their confident rationality
seems undercut by the chinese tissue papers used to construct this
calender, indicating that some truths at least may become more
accessible through the use of symbols and through the straight
jackets of western explanations. The papers refer to the Chinese
funerary practice of burning to ashes as a way of exorcising evil and
releasing good spirits heavenwards.
Yet all these narratives
start with out beginning. Language revolves like a old style vinyl
scratched with repetition and stuck in the same groove. NEVER LOVED
repeats itself to the point of obsession. Becoming less coherent with
each renewed statement. Braille text made as tactile pressure points
restate language’s inadequacy where feelings are at stake, and
underlies the hint that reason and feelings may well be blind to each
other’s needs. The words become a mantra, their truth ever more
questionable with each new repetition.
