Clary Stolte, CS_008 MODEL 003 overview, 2006
Galerie van den Berge, Goes, the Netherlands
Brent: At some level an artwork needs to quench the desire – the need to know what something is. But also, it shouldn’t stop there. In your case what is ‘known’ is a shape. You generally use the square and it is often imbued with the hues around white. Robert Ryman used a square because it took away the need to make what he thought were arbitrary decisions. In your case I’m not exactly sure why you chose this shape, but it works. I consider the shape as a container, or a surface, a plate that you serve things on. Left bare it goes back the other way: is a plate, a surface, and an empty container. But always there is something there.
In this ‘presence’ I am also aware of something that is very portable, an ornament almost. You can arrange this in any number of ways. It can be put away and brought back out, and ‘re-presented’. Then as shape, surface, container, and ornament all this starts to perform something like a gift. And how this gift is presented seems very much important. Now we move through into ritual.
Clary: When looking at my work I am often told that the observer is searching for some kind of support, looking for a ‘known’, looking for a way to ‘enter’. The eye tries to focus on something though may not know where to start.
“VOLUMESURFACE #2” (2004), is a square; a semi-transparent work made out of folded paper. There is not much there to lead you in; even the edges are hard to focus on.
To really understand why I use the square as a shape and white as a color, I have to take you back a bit in time to the moment I came to the decision to start working with these elements. The square and the color ‘white’ was used by artists from the early 60’s and 70’s, such as the American artist Robert Ryman, and the Dutch painter Jan Schoonhoven. My work is most placed in this tradition, and that of minimal art. But maybe when I explain a little further about my way of using these elements it will become clearer that my work also has other contexts in art history…
