For the Dialogue/Monologue section of Artissima 2021 Dürst Britt & Mayhew is proud to present a duo exhibition by Lennart Lahuis and Willem Hussem.
Lennart Lahuis has a strong interest in the fleeting and disposable nature of images and texts. He deploys a wide variety of techniques and materials to transform his chosen subjects into meditations on time, temporality and transience. This results in objects and installations that search for the limits of intelligibility and balance on the brink of disappearance. An example is an ongoing series for which he covers photographic images with paper to which he applies wax, rendering the images unrecognisable; the viewer cannot just cast a glance but needs to slow down in order to gain access to the visual information on display.
Central in the booth is an installation consisting of a water boiler, a vessel, a trashbin and a barrel. These various ‘containers’ produce words from water vapour that form the sentence “when is it / that we / feel change / in the air”. The words are only legible for a short time and then evaporate, after which the words are produced again. It conveys a feeling of writing with clouds, as well as commenting on the sudden and opaque shifts that continue to occur within our societies.
Next to Lahuis’ beeswax works the presentation contains paintings and works on paper by the late artist and poet Willem Hussem, whose oeuvre is built on a constant aspiration towards simplicity and clarity. It was in Zen Bhuddism that he discovered an intellectual basis for his universalistic outlook on the world that would determine his thought and work. In the 1960s Hussem formulated a particular verbal and visual language that tied in with his philosophical views. In poetry, he found this in short lyrics, while in art he found it in a style that steered a middle path between expressionism and lyrical constructivism.
The selected works by Hussem are all characterized by cloud-like forms and elements that seem to drift off of the canvas or the paper, which makes them resonate with Lahuis’ work. Moreover Lahuis has applied three of Hussem’s poems, which speak of clouds and fog, on the side-panels of the crates in which his vaporizers are presented.
