Art as inner necessity - Dominique Stroobant

"If art is not a necessity, you don't need art. It must want to come out of you.
The desire to make something and to articulate yourself through it is an inner necessity."
Dominique Stroobant, Miseglia-Carrara, 31 July 2011

Categories such as artist, philosopher, collector, sociologist, gallery owner or the scarcely graspable meta-category, art, do not play any central role for Dominique Stroobant in his thinking and practice. Stroobant does not fit into any pigeonhole and therefore does not correspond to any of the usual classifications aiming to lay down roles, functions and thus predictable modes of behaviour. He lives according to his own law-like regularities and in this has the courage and power to carry out his ideas. Dominique Stroobant is an author who is able to translate his questions born from curiosity into dream-images and inventions, and to transform these into matter. His sculptures rise from the depths of his creative mind that one could compare to a quarry, grown out of the traditional sediments of the human history of culture and technology. 
Stroobant has questions and finds solutions that could allow his multifarious actions to be categorized as those of a stonemason, photographer, sculptor, draughtsman, scientist, engineer or communicator, were it not for that inspiringly anarchistic trait in his being, which renders such a simple classification impossible. The first picture book he looked at in his early years in Westphalia in Germany was Struwwelpeter (Shaggy Peter) by Heinrich Hoffmann in 1854. Because of its questionable morality, it has come into disrepute today, but for more than a century this book has taught children where disorderly behaviour can lead. Fortunately, Stroobant did not let himself be influenced by the misfortunes of a "Fidgety Philip" or "Johnny Head in the Air", but interiorized what was rule-breaking and imaginative in it. The play with order and disorder, the search for the rule in what is apparently without one, and the pleasure in what is original drives him. Stroobant frequently likes to quote a statement by his friend, Max Bill: "I am chaotic, but have a great need to create order".
When one views Stroobant's sculptures, the lightness of these tension-filled forms sawn from marble or granite with diamond wires is fascinating. Stroobant works in Carrara at a stonemasons’ studio equipped with state-of-the-art equipment for working with stone, whose spirit and organization are rooted in medieval stonemasons' lodges. The forms for his works are found by shaping clay before being geometrically transformed into ideal art forms — the Hegelian "art-beautiful". In sculptures such as Door Vinnen Heen, Voile or Matrice, so-called 'ruled surfaces' emerge that cannot be rolled up into a plane, as is the case with a cone or a cylinder. A hyperbolic paraboloid, a curved surface without a centre is generated in space by the motion of a straight line.  If the stone being worked is rotated on its own axis on a supporting surface, while the straight wire saw moves downward, parabolic forms arise that cannot be grasped photographically and also challenge human perception.
Classical art history developed its methods of viewing and analyzing works from painting. Language describes art works, but can never be anything more than an approximation. A painting can be seen. A sculpture is a thing that can be seen, felt and walked around, and whose view changes with every movement. In contrast to perceiving painting, what is unavoidably invisible from each point of view, the rear, is also always conceived. The exciting thing about Stroobant's most recent works is the difficulty of grasping the curved surfaces from the front and rear. According to Max Bill, sculptures are "knots in space". Knots attain their tension through the energy they bundle and retain. Spatially they can scarcely be imagined. Knots, like sculptures, have to be understood and thus solved. Stroobant's works are fascinating in this way. They foster attentiveness, attract, make viewers curious and teach them that there are elementary differences between sculpture and painting.

Dirk Pörschmann, Kassel/Germany, January 2012
Translated from the German by Dr Michael Eldred, artefact text & translation, Cologne

Commissioned by Axel Vervoordt, the author is working on a monograph on sculptures, photographs, drawings and illustrations by Dominique Stroobant. The book, which will comprehensively present Stroobant's versatile oeuvre for the first time, is to appear in summer 2012.

Opening Dominique Stroobant Tempi e fili - Seil und Zeit

Next show Dominique Stroobant Tempi e Fili - Seil und Zeit

Opening Hiroshi Sugimoto - Lightning Fields

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

LIGHTNING FIELDS

December 8th 2011 till January 21st 2012
Open from Wednesday till Saturday from 2 to 6 pm

The artist’s exhibition at Axel Vervoordt gallery mirrors Sugimoto’s conceptual approach upon the origins of early life. This exhibition focuses on two of the three periods in the history of earth: “I wish to simulate the history of the earth in three periods: first, a dark hot planet shrouded in thick clouds of gas its primordial sea repeatedly struck by lightning and pelleted by tiny asteroids; second, a stable atmosphere and vast murky protobiotic waters; and third, the Paleozoic sea churning with biological phenomena.”

The gallery will feature six works from the Lightning Fields series. Sugimoto radically created the Lightning Fields through a method that did not involve the use of a camera. Sugimoto bought a Van de Graaff generator, capable of creating 400,000 volts, and he used it to charge a metal ball with static for up to 10 minutes. The negative pole was created by a large metal tabletop, on which he placed a six-by-three-foot sheet of film.

"When I feel the charge is strong enough then I just move the ball closer to the metal sheet and at a certain point — bang! — it just sparks," Sugimoto explains. The results, which he refers to as "lightning fields," often resemble meteor showers and, if the charge is powerful enough, create a treeing effect on the film, shattering it with forks of energy.

“Ligurian Sea, Saviore, 1993” represents the world the day after, represented by Hiroshi Sugimoto using equal proportions of sky and sea, lacking all human presence. 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Tokyo, 1948) has lived and worked in New York City since 1974. Hiroshi Sugimoto's interest in art began early. Influenced by Minimalism and Conceptual Art, he also has a lifelong connection to the work and philosophy of Marcel Duchamp. Central to Sugimoto's work is the idea that photography is a time machine, a method of preserving and picturing memory and time. This theme provides the defining principle of his ongoing series including, among others, Dioramas (1976); Theaters (1978- ); and Seascapes (1980- ). He places extraordinary value on the technical aspects of photography, printing his work with meticulous attention and a keen understanding of the nuances of silver-print making and its potential for tonal richness in his seemingly infinite palette of blacks, whites, and grays.

He had one-person exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; MCA, Chicago; and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among others.

His work is in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The National Gallery, London; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian Institute of Art, Washington DC; and Tate, London, among others.

Hiroshi Sugimoto - Visions in my Mind