OA06

Today, I’d like to introduce the works of Patrick, a painter from Zimbabwe, Africa. As I like his works a lot, and he likes my works a lot, we exchanged some paintings after OA.
He always paints Black Africans like himself. The paintings are not so big – about size 15 to 20. He rarely paints dramatic scenes: a few men sitting together on a street, a man and a woman talking intimately leaning against a taxi, a man painting a wall, a man lying on a bed... and so on. Neither these ‘scenes’ nor the way he paints them urges anything. Instead, his paintings show that there is ‘a certain distance.’ This sense of distance, however, makes you feel closeness rather than distance, and sense of interiority rather than exteriority; in other words, in Patrick’s paintings, there is familiarity which the paint creates, at the same time there is formality which the two-dimensionality creates. The sense of distance in his paintings thus make us feel comfortable about the fact that we are looking at a flat surface covered by some paint – the fact that we are looking at paintings. The motif of his paintings – the black workers’ ‘interiority on streets’ (or streets within a room) – also fits perfectly into the way his paintings are. To me, his paintings realize one of the happiest states of paintings. They make me happy.
Patrick comes to his studio at night. Smoking, and a beer in his hand, he finishes his paintings one after another – this I cannot see next year. I will miss him a lot.

06. Patrick Makumbe

The first three are paintings; the fourth one is a drawing shown in a different room.

December 21, 2005 9:33 AM

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OA05

This is a special month for OA reports -- OA report#5 is on an artist from Germany, Tine Melzer. Her works usually engage with the combinations of two things such as: drawings and books, words and books, alphabet and words. She does many things; she makes books, posters, writes the lyrics as collaboration etc. – very interesting works (Rijks has a print workshop where you can learn the craft of bookbinding). Book, words, letters of alphabet – by breaking down the system that each format relies on and by re-creating new systems, she tries to visualize the gap between the system and the meaning given by the system. She gives each format a new system, but not in order to give it a meaning. What she does is to annihilates the meaning of words or sentences, so that we will be able to realize the fact that these were organized by a system or a structure.

05. Tine Melzer

A book titled ‘They Say.’ The book consists of two sentences: ‘she says’ and ‘he says.’ ‘The Complete Dictionary’: this book contains all the words that can be formed with 26 letters of alphabet (26 to the 26th power). Next to the room of ‘books,’ she had another room with a slide projection titled ‘When in Doubt…’ (this clause is followed by various sentences). This image is taken from the catalogue; in the actual presentation, the slide changes every second as if we turn the page of a book. This work was originally a drawing on B-size paper. Using a green pen, she filled the paper with lines of about 4-5 cm. As she was not quite satisfied with what she’d done, she cut the paper into smaller pieces and made it into a book. Then she was happy with

December 20, 2005 10:59 AM

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OA04

Today’s OA report is on... the sexiest and the best-looking person at Rijks – Yasmijn. She is a real beauty, I tells ya. Plus her works are interesting – she makes them deliberately ‘feminine’ – she is a convinced criminal in that sense. Wow...!
We took a cab together when we were in Istanbul.
Yasmijn: ‘I love taking a cab. I’m lazy, you know.’
I: ‘I love taking a cab too (I’ve been too poor to afford such luxury though...)
It began like this – and we talked each other about the pleasure of being lazy.

04. Yasmijn Karhof
‘Sugar’: this image is from the light box version. The video version has a landscape photo of a mountain with clouds and mist in the background. In front of that image, she blows a cigarette smoke into a small sugar mountain on her palm. As the camera zooms into the mountain and smoke, slowly and thickly, the sugar mountain gradually dissolves into the background.

‘Rain’: a video work. A woman gets into a cab, soaked in rain. The camera zooms into the raindrops falling from the tips of her hair and then follows her eyes to those on the car window. The movement of the camera feels as if it is an intimate exchange of glances within a room. She gets off from the cab and we see her face reflected in the raindrop on the outside widow. The camera follows her face from the inside. The raindrop gradually magnifies her face with uneasy intimacy. Suddenly she is out of sight. A shot of an empty raindrop.

Another video work: a man is juggling four letters in Hericopterstraat (the blue plaque on the right corner tells you the name of the street). In less than a minute, he drops the letters and they break.

December 6, 2005 1:03 AM

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The Photo Shoot

Short intermission from OA reports.
I had a photo shoot today. Up to twice a year, we can ask for a photo shoot for the documentation of our works.

The works being taken is a ‘drawing’ – an arrow piercing a clog. I did not put a hole through the canvas; the arrow is cut in the middle. So in reality, it is impossible to present this work as it is in the image (for the photo shoot, the arrow is suspended by gut). A work I like but – cannot be on display.

December 3, 2005 11:47 PM

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OA03

People have started to move into their new studio. In our second year, we can choose an apartment and a studio. I’ll stay in the same apartment, but I will move into a new studio. It is in a separate block called ménage, a big brick building – a bit like an old train station. There were several other choices too – bigger or lighter – but each has its inconveniences such as an odd-shaped ceilings, unnecessary windows, pillars and beams... I think I am lucky to get the space I like – an ordinary studio space.
Today’s OA report is on my mabudachi (true friend), a Dutch photographer, Peggy (a super cute girl!).

03. Peggy Franck

She said that thinking about paintings often motivates her to take photographs.
She said that she often gets inspiration for her photographs from thinking about paintings.

I sat as a model for some of her works this year. This is one of them.

The object in the middle is a sculpture on which photograph is pasted. This is not a triangular pyramid. This tells you that this used to be a two-dimensional work, by revealing the process of being cut and folded.

It was interesting to see the process of how a photographer makes photographs – how she develops her ideas, how she choose the size, how she trims it and so on.

December 2, 2005 1:28 AM

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