The Magic of Mist

Pietje Tegenbosch

The camera glides over bare mountain ridges and sandy plains. Punished by the sun, the earth seems an ancient pink. The landscape lies motionless in the blistering light. The stillness in the vast valleys is guarded by giant rock formations eroded over time into irregular shapes that divide the landscape into different compartments, one after the other, complete with passageways and panoramic views, like rooms in a sand castle of superhuman dimensions. The shrill, whining blues sounds of a slide guitar accompany the birdlike flight of the images, which come to a stop as the lens focuses on a figure in the middle of the empty expanse of the desert.

A film is a succession of countless still images. Some of these images nestle themselves into our memory. Others disappear into obscurity. After the fact, anyone who has watched a film constructs a film of his own. The opening scene of what has since become a classic, Paris Texas (1984) by Wim Wenders, one of Reinoud Oudshoorn’s favourite films, is characteristic in generating numerous images and experiences. For Oudshoorn, the camera’s images, which alternate from showing the immensity of the desert from up close and then from far away, is a sublime experience of spaciousness.

Hanging on the wall in Reinoud Oudshoorn’s studio is an untitled work from 2005, made up of a horizontal ‘right angle’ whose two short sides are rounded off into a semicircle into which matte glass has been worked. Standing in front of the work, you look through the glass, shaped like a paperclip, by way of a dark shadow that disappears into perspective, into a smaller echo of the larger form. Your eye is pulled into the depth, into an emptiness that proves a stage for contradictory associations.

The image of the rear view mirror of a car looms up. The reflection of passing impressions in mirrors like this are linked to a different memory, that of the physical experience of the enclosed character of the car itself, a selfcontained volume within the landscape around it, a capsule that skims along other capsules, shaves past other spaces, whether they are automobiles, woodlands or buildings. But the memory is incomplete, and as the image vanishes from the mirror and the eye once again looks from the large form back to the emptiness in the small oval form, it remains hanging in the shrouded transparency of the glass, in the living details of the iron, in the beauty of the basic simplicity of form, as a silence descends across the image. The threedimensionality in the image is imperceptibly transported into a space for one's own imagining. The image has become a vehicle, an intermediary.

Being carried along in the experience of space is a leitmotif in the work of Reinoud Oudshoorn. The process in which his sculptures take shape, as Oudshoorn explains in his studio, invariably begins with staring at a white surface, a piece of paper or an empty white wall. Because of the intensity of looking at it, at the moment this white surface of the wall alters from a surface into a state, it creates a consciousness of enormous potential. That staring and looking results in tapping into new ideas, as well as further development in older sculptures, on plans not yet developed and the recycling of forms, formats and volumes, materials and techniques not yet completely worked through. The contours of a new work are extracted from the crossfertilization of the white emptiness and the experiences of the artist. This is how the intangible, the immaterial, becomes material.

In the discovery of the power and the possibilities of a white surface lies a memory from the artist’s childhood Reinoud Oudshoornspent his childhood on a country estate near Ommen, an expansive area where he could wander alone, endlessly, through the fields and woods. He enjoyed walking most when a thick mist lay over the land. It not only created a muffled silence, but it also meant a kind of emptiness and the excitement of filling that emptiness with his own fantasies, thoughts and images. ‘It has to do with the fact that we can experience space as something larger and that this experience becomes more intense as an image becomes more diffuse. The illusion is not disturbed. Mist is a safe blanket.’

When he was about 18, Oudshoorn saw an exhibition of work by Barnett Newman. The retrospective at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum was an eyeopener. ‘The spaciousness in a painting like Cathedra, its intense blue and that white band next to it, was overwhelming. You could walk into the painting, as it were. For me, that was a starting point.’

Threedimensional space, transparency, a desire for harmony and a fascination for the classic rules of perspective are ingredients that would later play a major role in the work 8 of Reinoud Oudshoorn. On leaving high school, he chose to study at the Academy for Art and Industry in Enschede. His talent was recognized, but after a year and a half, he had seen enough and moved to Ibiza, where he lived for some months in a small house in the middle of the island, hoping to discover what it meant to be occupied with art day in, day out. To earn his keep, he cleaned private swimming pools in his spare time. After nearly a year, Oudshoorn decided to return to the Netherlands. Through the painter Lucassen, he was accepted at Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem, where he met Ansuya Blom, Eli Content and later, Erik Andriesse, Marlene Dumas and Leo Vroegindeweij. Oudshoorn had the feeling here that he had found a place where he was taken seriously. There were critical discussions about the work and lifelong friendships were forged. After his final presentation at Ateliers ’63, Oudshoorn moved to Amsterdam. The work he exhibited for his final project resulted in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum inviting Oudshoorn to take part in their 1976 exhibition, 11 Painters.

In the late 1970s – a period when Reinoud Oudshoorn was inspired by the work of Jan Roeland, Ad Dekkers, Ben Akkerman and Carel Visser, as well as Elsworth Kelly – he increasingly began making sculptures, first alongside his painting, but he eventually set aside paint and brush. ‘Painting became too much illusion,’ he explains. ‘I wanted my work to be more physical. For me, my work is between the twodimensional and the threedimensional. Painting is too much illusion or deception, and a sculpture is too much of an obstacle. I wanted to create a bridge between the physical element of the viewer and the space. A work must produce more space than it consumes. I use perspective, derived from the illusionary language of painting, and apply the potential of perspective to my sculptures. That way, I try to create a bridge between the spatial illusion of the flat surface and the concrete reality of the threedimensional sculpture.’

One of Oudshoorn’s earlier works is an untitled piece from 1990, purchased by the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. The vertical work, made of wood covered with lead, is constructed from four independent forms that are placed with as little space as possible separating them, forming the contours of a square on the outside and a circle on the inside. The four corners rise to four tall points, higher than a man. This vertical orientation gives the feeling that the interior of the space contained by the four points actually also continues forever, up in the air. This work has a direct connection to the early paintings and the spatial experience that Oudshoorn had with the work of Barnett Newman and other American painters, including Elsworth Kelly and Mark Rothko. One can see the contours of that sculpture as a direct translation of the painted band in Barnett Newman’s painting. What matters is the idea of the image or sculpture as a container, the literal containment of space. More recent works investigate the vanishing point.

More recent works investigate the vanishing point. Because the physical experience of a sculpture is so important to Oudshoorn, he seeks ways to give his viewers the feeling that they are included in the totality of the space, in the world that lies behind the visible world. The vanishing point – always at a height of 1.65 metres in Oudshoorn’s case – is identical to the mist that he experienced as a youngster, activating that magical feeling of neverending infinity. In presentations of his work, in his studio or elsewhere, it is clear that Oudshoorn locates vanishing points in many different ways. He always shows works of varying formats, or for example, a sculpture in contact with the floor is alongside a hanging sculpture, as is the case with a recent untitled work from 2007, comprising an iron curve leaning against the wall and painted a dark, steel grey. The changing angle of the curve, which increases proportionately as the wide, spreading ends of the curve come closer to the viewer, are the result of the fact that the sculpture actually has two vanishing points. One pulls the eye downwards, into the depths, and the other disappears on the wall at eye level, above the highest point of the curve.

‘If you stand in front of the sculpture, you know that it all really happens at eye level. You feel just like when you are standing on a beach and as you look into the distance, you can still see the waves moving in the corner of your eye. That gives a sense of disorientation.’ Each sculpture moreover demands movement from the viewer. Viewing the sculptures from the sides not only makes it clear how they are constructed, but it generates a play of lines against volumes and forms.

Reinoud Oudshoorn’s working method is extremely precise. As he sits in his studio, the wall or a sheet of blank paper serves as a starting point. He then makes small sketches, drawings in which he experiments with the basic forms for a sculpture – circles and ellipses. He prefers to draw on pink, squared paper, because in the course of time, the pink fades and changes into beautifully varied tints, so that each drawing takes on colours of its own. When the sketches produce forms to be further developed into a sculpture, Oudshoorn starts on a fullscale drawing in the dimensions of the final sculpture. These are fascinating sheets of white paper on which, along with the sketch for the sculpture, he has written countless, seemingly obsessive series’ of numbers: descriptive geometry with calculations for ellipses.

‘People often ask me if I have a fascination for mathematics, but for me, the math is just a tool, the same way aesthetics is a tool and the same way that striving for technical perfection is a necessary ingredient in my work. But it is not an objective in itself. Craftsmanship does not interest me in that sense. I started writing down those formulas on my drawings because I would forget them if I didn't. What I most want in a work of art is intensity and integrity. Concentration is not a discipline for me. It grows out of fascination. That way, I know how I relate to the world.’

In ancient Greece, when the preSocratic philosophers began discussing the problem of what the beginning was of all things, according to Umberto Eco in The History of Beauty, it was finding a definition of the world as an ordered whole, following a single law. The Greeks experienced the world as Form, and that Form was equal to Beauty. Pythagoras later made an inextricable link between cosmology, mathematics, natural history and aesthetics. He was the first to say that the beginning of all things was the number. For Oudshoorn, the calculations accompanying his drawings are just a device, yet these ordered series’ evoke the sacred awe the Pythagoreans had for infinity and for the frontiers of what cannot be traced in memory.

‘I have developed an interest in all the problems involving the use of perspective. If you look at the development of perspective, you see that centred perspective is an awkward phenomenon. Just consider being at the beach and the discovery of seeing that horizon was not a straight line. What we learn in order to determine that space is central prospective. I play with that experience, for example, in the floor sculpture with the curve (mentioned above). As you stand at the edge of a large circle, which you cannot completely see because its edges are beyond your vision, you experience a parabola. I have an enormous fascination for those forms. I do not try to make attractive drawings or sculptures. I try to somehow get a grip on something, and in order to do it, I need that precision. Once the form for a sculpture has been determined, the choice of material follows. Each form, like the construction that has to support the form, demands its own material. Iron can refer back to a graphite pencil. Wood is interesting because of the lines of the grain and the warm character of the material, asking to be touched. I take all of these factors into account in the choices I make.’

Given his proclivity for spatiality and transparency – best expressed in his sculptures in glass and iron –Reinoud Oudshoorn continues a long, Dutch tradition of art – primarily painters. Glass is often perceived as a symbol for the metaphysical, the contemplative, on the one hand because of the clarity of glass and on the other because of its mysteriousness, a factor perfectly generated in the spatial quality of Oudshoorn’s sculptures, in which different kinds of matt glass, contained in iron, together form a construction. As Jan Hoet once said, ‘Transparency in relation to glass fits Mondriaan. The white in Mondriaan’s paintings is like glass, almost like water. It has a landscape quality.’ The tradition to which the work of Reinoud Oudshoorn also belongs is the tradition of seeking structural clarity and coherence. The preference for transparency comes from the need to bring depth to perception and also to avoid established boundaries and frameworks.

This much is made clear in one of Oudshoorn’s most recent (untitled) works, from 2008. ‘I was playing with the idea of clouds, the swelling of formations that are constantly changing. I wanted to make glass bubbles, forms that seem to move and themselves contain space, but that also create new space.’ This wall sculpture is reminiscent of an optical instrument, such as an ophthalmologist would use, with complicated lenses and open and closed parts. It is made up of three circles of different formats, captured within a larger circle, and behind it an echo of the same forms, now in a smaller, progressive perspective. The circles are made of iron, with glass soldered into it. The relationship between the different circles is always the same. Oudshoorn wanted movement and multiplicity, which explains the three circles, for three is the lowest number for multiple objects. The circles offer a mist we look through, and the colour and texture of the iron in which the holes for the circles have been cut looks like graphite, giving the sculpture the feel of an endlessly worked drawing. The structure causes the smaller forms to float in just the right way, behind the other surfaces, partly reinforced by shadows. The thickness of the outside line of the three circles is chosen in such a way that the material feel of the iron is retained, without it becoming a flat surface, but rather a contour that accentuates the transparency. This too is a sculpture that plays with illusion and threedimensionality. ‘I became a sculptor,’ muses Reinoud Oudshoorn, ‘but maybe I am still that painter in search of magic.’

Author: Pietje Tegenbosch
Pietje Tegenbosch is an art historian and art critic, and a freelance writer for the Dutch daily newspapers "de Volkskrant" and "Het Parool".