Curator texts

Marco Hompes
Director Kunstmuseum Heidenheim
2022

Diving into the unknown

The exhibition The Taste of Forbidden Fruit brings together various works by the artist Jeroen Cremers, who was born in Reuvers in the Netherlands in 1972. At first glance, they could hardly be more different: ceramics with chapped surfaces and partial paintwork meet precise collages rich in motifs. They are juxtaposed with other collages that are more reminiscent of gestural painting and grotesque-looking plastic heads made of cardboard.

Despite the aesthetic differences, a recurring and thus unifying principle can be recognised within Cremers’ pictorial world. This is because the Berliner-by-choice borrows his motifs from everyday objects and phenomena. The selection is often based on subjective criteria or personal memories. However, Cremers reinterprets the motifs shown in such a way that the seemingly familiar becomes strange.

Depending on the medium, Cremers’ treatment can take various forms. Sometimes objects or bodies are distorted or remodelled, sometimes fragmented or combined in such a way that they have an unusual, perhaps even irritating effect. By eliciting something strange from the familiar, the Dutch artist invites the viewer to discover the secrets, or rather the magic, of the everyday. However, this will never be completely successful, which is why an interpretation of the works takes place linguistically in the subjunctive.

That sounds rather abstract at first, but it can be illustrated using selected examples. The alienation of the everyday is clearly recognisable, for example, in the work Coffee Grinder. Although such appliances are no longer used very often, they are still surrounded by a great deal of nostalgia. Most people are familiar with these machines with their typical cranks that can grind beans into a fine powder. This may be from personal experience or just as a memory of parents or grandparents who used coffee grinders to make their Sunday coffee. It is an image from the past that nevertheless radiates cosiness. For the artist himself, the coffee grinder is also a motif from his own past, as he used to play with his parents’ discarded grinder as a child. In the ceramic version on display, however, the surface has been altered: A red texture covers the appliance. This is reminiscent of coral, crystal efflorescence or an expanding mesh. With its red tonality and pointed spikes, it looks somewhat menacing. On the one hand, because it is impossible to operate the device or only possible with painful palms, and on the other, because the reddish structure is unfamiliar to us. We usually approach the unknown with caution, and rightly so. However, Cremers gives the audience room for interpretation here. The red lichen could be poisonous, contain a virus or some other form of parasitic force. Or it may have been under water for a long time and is overgrown with coral. However you look at the work, it is often reminiscent of a testimony from another, past or as yet unrealised world. This is no coincidence. Much of the work was created in response to the coronavirus pandemic. According to Cremers, it seemed to him that something old was coming to an end and a new era was dawning. He responded to this with ceramics and collages in which old and new come together.

This applies to Blue Cat, for example. A shadowy body can be recognised here, which, with the help of the title, would be read as feline. Figurines of cats would perhaps be more likely to be found in cheap decoration or one-euro shops and categorised as kitsch. In fact, Cremers also has a private memory here, as his mother used a porcelain kitten as decoration. However, the ceramics on display differ from small porcelain figurines in several ways. Firstly, the anatomy is not what you would expect. The uneven glaze, characterised by imperfections, also catches the eye, lending the depiction a similar strangeness to the coffee grinder discussed above. The blue colour, reminiscent of lapis lazuli, and the missing head are also unusual. Both lend the cat something far removed from our time. It looks like a precious treasure from times gone by. Anyone with a knowledge of history will probably think of specific epochs in history. Wasn’t the cat a favourite pet in ancient Egypt and the embodiment of the goddess Basket? And wasn’t lapis lazuli also considered one of the most valuable gemstones in ancient Egypt, which is why the famous mask of the pharaoh Tutankhamun was adorned with gold and this very stone?

With all the associative attributions that its indeterminacy allows,

Through all the associative attributions that its indeterminacy allows, Blue Cat becomes an enigma that can trigger a similar sense of wonder in us as ancient burial artefacts. Decay and construction, history and the present coincide in Cremers’ visual world and can thus develop a unique sound.

The artist’s collages are also atmospheric. When art historians hear the word collage, they usually think of neatly cut-out elements from magazines that are put together in new and unusual forms, something familiar from famous artists such as Hannah Höch or John Heartfield. Cremers has developed his own approach, which integrates torn paper elements as well as cut ones. For his series The Unexpected Guest the torn paper is essential, as he uses it to create a black background whose whitish torn edges look like cracks in a dark universe. In this dark environment, a yellow table seems to float on each work, each made from torn pieces of yellow paper.

The “setting” constructed here already has an almost magical effect and suggests that something special is taking place here. But what exactly? In any case, there are no people to be seen, only objects that indicate human behaviour. Individual objects on a table are not unusual in everyday life. In the visual arts, however, they quickly take on a symbolic character. Fruit can mutate into a memento mori, a pair of peasant shoes can spark entire philosophical discourses or a watch can reflect the wealth of the person who commissioned it. We are therefore used to reading objects in paintings as auratically charged symbols. But which ones are we talking about here? The Unexpected Guest V, for example, combines a Ming vase, beverage cups from a fast-food company and a bucket hanging from the upper edge of the painting with a geometric object that can be recognised as an abstract form.

The Ming vase is a valuable cultural motif and a symbol of a bygone, non-European era, while the cups, also vessels, are a symbol of the fast-moving, American-influenced consumer culture. Beer bottles or rubbish from a world characterised by consumerism repeatedly appear in Cremer’s pictures. For him, these are linked to the question of what will actually remain of our culture. After moving from Amsterdam to Berlin, he repeatedly observed how carelessly beer bottles are left lying around. In direct contrast to the Ming vase, one can certainly ask oneself whether this is what defines our time: Not elaborately designed and ornately decorated ceramics, but decadence and piles of rubbish.

The cleaning bucket, like the vase and the mugs a vessel, contains a geometric shape. This symbolises the unknown, which appeared in 2020 in the form of corona. What will a coming time bring, what will its symbols be, what will its vessels be?

The Dutch artist deliberately brings together objects from the past, such as a coffee grinder, a sword, an oil lamp or the Ming vase, which are associated with a human activity or profession (building blocks for children’s play, a top hat and playing cards for the art of magic, a book for reading and learning) or consumer objects, such as paper cups, an apple, coffee cups and ashtrays. Each of these objects has the potential to be a symbol. The interplay between them does not always result in a clear interpretation. This is important to the artist, as he wants the audience to bring their own experiences to the interpretation.

The Talking Heads trigger a completely different kind of irritation. The works, made of cardboard, show heads whose anatomical details deviate from what is understood to be a “normal” head. In number IX, the left eye and nose still appear normal, but when the viewer’s gaze shifts to the right side, a new face emerges that is more of a profile. Art history is familiar with such representations of multiple perspectives from cubist depictions of people, for example by Pablo Picasso. He utilised the simultaneity of profile and frontal depiction, especially in paintings showing women. Held in warm, saturated colours, his depictions radiate a certain elegance despite the deviations. The effect is also easier to realise in two-dimensional depictions.

Cremers, on the other hand, leaves his audience in a state of uncertainty. The three-dimensionality always results in new perspectives that make it almost impossible to “read” the faces. Are they grimaces distorted by pain? Are they an expression of inner madness? Perhaps history can be invoked again. One might think of the “Gueule Cassée”, the disfigured soldiers who returned from the First World War. Perhaps the remains of dead people from indigenous cultures known as “shrunken heads” come to mind, or mummy masks again. Or are they visions of a “new man”?

Jeroen Cremers seems to take pleasure in avoiding any ambiguity. That’s what he calls one of his talking heads (Henry and Edward). Who is meant by that? If you look through the story, you could find several namesakes. However, two literary figures are the inspiration here: Dr Henry Jekyll and Mr Edward Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel revolves around a split personality who leads a double life. And so Cremer’s Talking Head is also a head with two faces.

However, if you think you are seeing a confrontation with history in the heads, an Adidas sign flashes up at you in Talking Head IV. This is due to the manufacturing process of the works, which are cut out of used cardboard boxes and screwed together. But the fourth piece in the series is a little different: tubular elements run through the head. Picasso could be invoked again here, but the impression is a technoid, rather futuristic one, a hybrid of man and machine that one would expect to find more in the world of gaming design, comics or science fiction.

Old and new, familiar and strange, past and future; in his art, Jeroen Cremers harmonises opposites and thus creates an in-between space that is never unambiguous, but at the same time stimulates the viewer’s own interpretations.

Pascalle Mansvelders,

art historian & curator

Wido Smeets, journalist, publisher

2019

The question about that straw

Good artistry is a combination of many factors. These include the known talent and the permeated discipline to perseverance and hard work. But these also include elements such as the daring to be patient, the support from the environment and continuing to believe in yourself. Jeroen Cremers has it all. Above all, he has a subject. A way of expressing himself that he knows how to turn into a material that suits him.

Cremers lived and worked in Maastricht, Amsterdam and Berlin. In the latter city he seems to have found his playground, but despite that his work reveals that end stations do not exist for him; it’s about the continuity of progress and change as such that matters to him. On how moments and directions in a human life influence others. And end goals do not exist. As an artist, what matters to him is the insight that grows from how every aspect, every phase, every influence, every place together, and only together, can show what a human life is all about. Jeroen Cremers doesn’t do it for less.

Everything but eternity

The most striking part of Jeroen Cremers’ oeuvre are the sculptures – although the constant in his development as an artist remains drawing, the primal discipline that makes it possible to change methods and themes within a second. Years of searching for content and materiality that matched each other brought him to cardboard, a material that places high demands on the artist: a material that is static and not very stable, you have to be able to cut and model well. Cardboard is also malleable, not as clay of course, but you can process it in many ways, even on the surface, until you can barely see, certainly from some distance, that it is cardboard.

Cardboard as a material is a maverick in art history, in which sculptures are soon linked to a sense of eternal value. Cardboard is precisely a material that emphasizes the transience of everything. Also that of the arts. An idiosyncratic and brave choice, given the restrictions that the material entails for the maker, who has to be able to comply with restrictions. Cardboard demands a great deal of the artist’s visual ability. Because if you can’t form a building materi- al if you want to, you have to bend over to the material. That requires inner strength, which is palpable in Cremers’ work.

The artists cardboard sculptures float in the space, sometimes in wooden frames. They stand or lie on pedestals. Their scaly skin here and there is reminiscent of a medieval hauberk – a protection that did not really help the figures depicted. They are introverted, hurt and battered, with amputated limbs, without lower body, decapitated. The underside of the skull is missing from a huge head, laid upside down on a pedestal. Jeroen Cremers’ universe is populated by characters who live in a flawed world that tragically stumbles to its end.

The dystopia Cremers sketches in his sculptures is confirmed in his two-dimensional work. His more recent works, collages, show how he finds a tone of his own in a classical technique with a different form and interpretation. Traditionally, the collage is a technique par excellence in which loose parts, often made of paper, are joined together to form a new whole. As a rule this new image is formed with existing representations, such as parts of bodies or land- scapes, which in a reconstituted whole take on a different meaning.

Cremers seems to have wondered whether things can be done differently, an important question that the better artists continue to ask themselves throughout their lives. He arranges the loose particles as we know the concept of collage at its basis, but turns the core of it inside out. Cremers does not use existing forms to create new ones, he creates new ones and arranges them according to a prevailing world view with the emptiness and darkness that we know from his three-dimensional work.

Last straws

Upside down

The attention for the human deficit in Jeroen Cremers’ world view was grippingly summa- rized in a solo exhibition he had in Odapark center for Contemporary Art in Venray (NL) 2017/18: The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back. The title refers to the last straw that will break the camel’s back when you continue to load endlessly. How little it takes to make the world falter sometimes becomes painfully clear, as in a confrontation through the conse- quences of a global humanitarian crisis, caused by an as yet untreatable virus, an even more futile catalyst than a straw.

Barely two years on, the exhibition seems to have had a forward-looking power: how an initially underestimated viral infection such as Covid19 can cause an enormous reaction and shake our lives and world view. While the demise is a cumulative effect of previous actions, decisions and automatisms that together form ingredients for eventual collapse.

Last straws are also reminiscent of Seneca (4 B.C. 65 A.D.), the stoic philosopher who described how death is central to human life and felt that death is not to be feared because we have been on our way to it since the day of birth. We die a little every day, the last day of a life is only the completion of what preceded it. The last straw always comes, for every camel, and for everyone.

The fascination for the development of our social behaviour, in which fate, violence and conflict play an important role, remains an inexhaustible source in Cremers’ work. Gripped by the human tendency towards (self-)destruction, he examines how people influence each other and build up and break down the world in which they live, a cyclical movement that raises the question of whether this can ever be deviated from. If our world consists of action and reaction, is there still something in itself?

Like art, life does not begin and end with answers, but with questions. Always new questions. Until that last question.
About that straw.

Kurt Beers
Director Beers Gallery London
2019

The 100 Sculpturors of tomorrow

Dutch artist Jerry Kowalsky – a pseudonym – is something of a scavenger: firstly of materials, scouring his environment for discarded cardboard packaging, and secondly of inspiration, the absurd and the extraordinary, from voodoo to science fiction to urban mythology. Working primarily in cardboard has provided the artist with a recognisable, firm but flexible material, one that is ubiquitous in our daily surroundings yet relatively scarce as an artistic medium. “I feel attracted to it, fascinated, it makes me curious, makes me want to explore,” he says. It is also impermanent and banal – qualities the artist says come “closer to being human”.

Cardboard is also shell-like: it is the hull, a housing for another more valuable or valued object. As such, it retains a certain ghostliness – Kowalsky says, “My work is a little bit like the house in the story of Hansel and Gretel; all candy and sweets on the outside but inside there is something dark.” The artist’s work displays a kind of perverse humanity, courting fantasy, fairy tale and absurdity; many pieces present human-animal hybrids. This reverence for storytelling – and for crude materiality – is also to be found in the work of another Dutch artist, Folkert de Jong.

Kowalsky, like de Jong, presents a theatrical, vaudevillian vision of humanity. One particular work, The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back (2017), sees a grown man plagued by a Pinocchio-like curse, his elongated nose stretched to a definitive point. The title suggests a tragic tale, and in some instances the figure has been displayed encased in a wooden ‘prison’. Kowalsky says, “It is about alienation, loneliness, fear, vulnerability and danger that is close, a darkness that is close. The idea that there is always a certain danger and darkness close to [each of us].

“Cardboard might seem an odd choice of material for a sculpture – while most art desperately clings to the idea of value and eternity. It is presumptuous to think that something will last forever.”

b. 1972, Reuver, The Netherlands; Lives and works in Berlin, Germany; Studied MA Sculpture, Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Maastricht, The Netherlands; jerrykowalsky.com