This book features 21 visual artists from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany who took part in the exhibitions Abstract Salon Part One (september / october 2004) and Part Two (april / may 2005) in Kunstruimte 09 in Groningen. The exhibitions did not pretent to give a complete overview of abstract or ‘representation-free’ – or whatever you want to call it – art.
What they did present was a cross section of the way in which ‘representation-free’ art is becommig painted art. Formal, intuitive, conceptual or poetic – it showed a diversity of highly personal ways to shape what’s without representation, as well as a broad range of means and materials.

For the exhibition ‘Part One’ we collected work by Rajlich in The Hague. It was recent work he had left for us with an acquaintance while he was staying somewhere else. In the centre of The Hague above a shop dealing in design goods from the nineteen fifties and sixties, we ended up in a dark, rather small living room. On the wall were some 15 Rajlichs from different periods, from the late sixties until now. In between hung work by Schoonhoven and other abstract and concrete work.
It brought tears in our eyes. That’s when we realized our own motivation for the organizing of the Abstract Salons. While we didn’t have the funds to pay for such a collection of art, what we could do was briefly crate our own living room (without bookshelves, tables, chairs and plants) and decorate it with the art we liked and rarely see get. And whatever the qualifications, interpretations and descriptions one could come up with for the work on show: there were some beautiful pieces of art, a feast for the eye and a joy for the senses.

In a continuing quest for ‘young’ and ‘innovating’, artists and art movements are being superseded and marked as anachronistic increasingly faster. After all, where there’s young and innovating, there’s old and outdated. The average turnover speed of ‘new art’ and ‘youn artists’ is nowadays an estimated two years. The underlying idea for ‘young and innovating’ is the concept that every next generation of artists and ‘new art movement’ can improve on the art produced by previous generations. And that’s nonsense, of course. The development of art is not a linear positive one. In the ‘Abstracte Salon’ participants were not selected for being young or old, but purely based on their work. The fact that it involved older as well as relatively younger artists was more or less a coincidence. Most artists featured in this book are now aged between 45 and 55. And this can’t be a coincidence. While it wasn’t our intention, perhaps the work by artists like these improves with age, just like good wine, amking itunsuitable to act in what is being referred to as the ‘generation gallop’ or to feature amongst the modern artentertainment after shown in museums and art galleries.

We recently took a slightly damaged panel to a sawmill to be trimmed by a few millimetres on one side. ‘Carefull’ we said, ‘it’s a painting.’ The sawyer turned the panel around and around and then said: ‘ so where is the painting?’ (perhaps superfluosly, the paining was abstract: a white surface in oil paint, blending into a pale violet towards the borders).

We also remember a discussion we had with acquaintance about an abstract painting, which went something like this: ‘See, that spot there, it looks like a tree and that makes this a horizon, you see?’ ‘And what if you turn the painting ninety degrees?’ ‘Yes, then it’s a wall or something, or panelling perhaps.’ ‘Culd you just leave the interpretations? And just look at the work itself?’ ‘Well, that makes it just decorative, of course’. And so it went on and on.
We’ve often heard people say at exhibitions ‘I don’t see anything in it’. Sometimes we would answer ‘no, thank goodness’. Then we would point out the beauty of a piece of art, the spatial effect of another piece, its material or perhaps immaterial appeal, the subtle colours, the underlying construction, the illusion of light, the use of classic or new materials, the revelatory new definition of the concept of ‘painting’, etc. In some cases this changed people’s ideas about the work. What we want to say is: somebody looking at the work will need to adapt the same attitude as the one the artist had when he or she made the work: an open mind, focus and time.

The participating artist were ask to summit a brief statement for the book, either a formal discription of their working method, oran explanatory note by a writer about their work, or whatever they could think of. One may have expected that the artists with the most formal work approach would have submitted the most formal texts, and the more intuitive ones a more intuitive text. But they didn’t. It rather seemed as if a certain balance between formal and informal was being sought between word and image.

If we were to define common characteristics in the works presented, we would say it was COLOUR OR MATTER.

Stichting Kunstruimte 09
Jacob van der Veen / jd vos