Pieter Slagboom Tekeningen 2001 2004 Drawings

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Beschrijving

Pieter Slagboom door Rutger Wolfson ea.

Tekeningen 2001 - 2004

Deze publicatie verscheen naar aanleiding van de tentoonstelling Pieter Slagboom: tekeningen 2001-2004 in De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal van 18 september 2004 tot en met 21 november 2004.

Introduction by Rutger Wolfson
In his recent work Pieter Slagboom has withdrawn from the physical world to an imaginary space in his mind. Over the past four years he has abandoned his installations and environmental works for drawings: drawings depicting his experiences in this inner world. Slagboom s earlier architectural sculptures and his recent drawings could hardly be more different. Whilst the environmental works are cool, distant and formalistic, the drawings drip with emotion, irrationality and shit. In his drawings Slagboom literally presents his inner world as a space. Sometimes explicitly: as a room, with proportions of a lounge. Other drawings are less specific, but viewers sense inuitively that the work is set in a space resembling a living room. The same kind of space, over and over again possibly because Slagboom, as do so many of us, pictures the part of his mind where his thoughts unfold in a room. But perhaps there is another, more obvious, explanation. Slagboom s home life appears to be the starting point for his work: a domestic setting as a mini universe, the size of a sitting room, where great universal themes are played out. Time and again, the matter at hand is the battle between the sexes in which the male seems to be the weaker party. Slagboom captures this contest in a distinct scratchy style that is not aimed to please, but to irritate: to sting, and to needle. Slagboom s drawings do not disclose his private universe directly. He portrays his domestic life through a series of highly personal symbols. His spaces are occupied by women producing an endless flow of shit, which men then use to build houses. Elsewhere, reminiscent of Goya, men are brought before women s tribunals. Men as children, women as mothers, biblical fruit trees, lemon squeezers, monkeys, birds, snakes, inland vessels and lavatories: these are all recurrent motifs in Slagboom s work. This symbolism takes nothing away from Slagboom s candour. Although his motifs are most personal, they do not form a smoke-screen for the artist to hide behind. On the contrary: those who study the drawings soon discover that the symbolism reveals rather than conceals namely a compulsively honest perspective on the at times oppressive war between the sexes. Slagboom s symbols stem from the frustrations in this battle: a personal conflict connected to universal themes, through which its cause is suddenly raised to epic proportions. This is where Slagboom s work derives its equally extraordinary as unexpected quality: its courage. His drawings are as sincere as candid and as bold as his earlier works were austere and formal. And so Slagboom s move from environmental works to drawings turns out to be less drastic as it would, at first, seem.


In zeer goede staat.
Ingenaaid, hardcover, linnen, 64 p.
1e druk, 2005.