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Episode 10 RUTH VAN HAREN NOMAN & WIEKI SOMERS
Opening Saturday November 23, 2013, 5-9 pm Exhibition until December 31 by appointment only
Beyond the studio window, the port of Rotterdam unfolds: its cranes, wharfs and horizon. Studio Wieki Somers’ models from the series Mitate are lined up in the foreground, miniaturized samurais and makeshift bonsais seemingly awaiting their destiny: life size – between 210 and 260 cm – and a function, to light with extra soul. In Japanese, “mitate” means to look at an object in a different way from usual, to imagine that thing as something else, allowing renewed experimentation – a philosophy that the Studio Weiki Somers has made its own, practicing a “magical realism” of design that brings out fantasy in the most common of objects. For a creator, three horizons seem possible, each implying singular spaces and times. For the painter, as for the novelist, the window frame is one. Dreaming of what happens on the other side, while remaining on your own – the Madame Bovary syndrome. A second horizon is distant, exotic, sublime – the one Casper David Friedrich’s miniature men contemplate: an elsewhere of travel that Wieki Somers has crystallized through drawing – before coming to the third dimension of design – the pseudo-morphism between their lamps and a suit of samurai armor, a stone garden, a puppet from Japanese repertory theater, or the face of a geisha. A third horizon, the most secret one, is that of the interior world, of the internal and fantastic life of forms – the introspective mirror stage: what Ruth van Haren Noman draws on for the essence of her paintings. From the simplicity of the formal arrangements and tints to their arbitrary association are born compositions, sometimes anthropomorphic, sometimes geometric, where naivety and mystery fight for dominance, in calm movements of infinite transfer, between equilibrium and imbalance, identity and difference, fringe and center, decorative vocabulary and declarative language. Rather than a dialogue, this joint exhibition is a combination. On the walls, a selection of works by Ruth van Haren Noman present her at once profound and candid universe. In the middle, arranged as if in a mineral garden, Wieki Somers’ models – that accompany a series of drawings – reveal the preliminary step of design research, when conception first tests out a physical form. To each her own territory and means of expression, but this hypothetical comparison is based on their similar taste for that space where the familiar is the flip side of otherness, where the contemporary and the timeless – be it brute, artisanal, stylistic – meet, and where forms are an inexhaustible playground. (I forgot a forth horizon, that of the frame and the pedestal, of the hypothetical spectator). – Clément Dirié
Born in 1975, Ruth van Haren Noman lives and works in Gent. She is represented by Base-Alpha Gallery, Antwerp, which hosted her last solo show in 2012. Born in 1976, Wieki Somers founded Studio Wieki Somers with Dylan van den Berg in 2003 in Rotterdam. Boijmans van Beuningen Museum (Rotterdam) will organize a retrospective of her design in Fall 2014. She is represented by Galerie kreo (Paris) where her new light series Mitate was presented in the Summer of 2013. Born in 1981, Clément Dirié is an art critic, an independent curator and an editor for JRP|Ringier publishing house. Many thanks to Ruth van Haren Noman, Wieki Somers and Noortje van den Elzen, as well as to Galerie kreo, especially Clémence & Didier Krzentowski, and Charlotte Brosse.
Photo : view from Studio Wieki Somers, Rotterdam © Elspeth Diederix |
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Middlemarch is a project space for contemporary art Middlemarch maintains an open and diverse approach Chaussée de Waterloo 550, 1050 Brussels
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