Marcel van Eeden

This exhibition consists of about 600 works created by the Dutch artist, Marcel van Eeden form 1993 to 2003 representing a melancholic sight towards the past through his eyes.

For his drawings, Van Eeden draws insouciantly on photographs and illustrations from old books and magazines, ranging from travel books and topographical atlases to books on art an perodicals. By meticulously copying these images, always beginging in the top left-hand corner of the paper and ending in the bottom right-hand corner, this avid bookworm makes them his own (through a process known in the language of postmodernism as "appropriation"). Almost as if he were a machine pre-programmed to draw, he chuns out at least one drawing a day and preferably more.

His philosophy and his curious, omnivorous choice of images forbid any uniformity of style. Just when you are inclined to describe Van Eeden´s drawing style in terms of graphic virtuosity, three-dimensionality, subtle tonal variation and the distinctive strokes and scratches of the pencil, he will suddenly abandon this delicate handling of the material in favour of an approah featuring sharp outlines and heavy chiaroscuro. His choice of images is equally eclectic. The subjects of his drawings range from desolate high-rise housing of the post-war area to fin-de-siècle-style interiors, and from restaurant scenes to nocturnal townscapes and old weaving patterns. Partly because of the dramatic lighting effects he uses, his subjects tend to exude a sinister atmosphere and convey a feeling of suspense. Marcel van eeden´s drawings can be viewed as nothing less than an obsessive attempt to reconstruct the period prior to his birth and hence to gain access to an era that he himself never witnessed. For this reason, they must be regarded as a single coherent body of work, an encyclopaedic corpus embracing every aspect of life prior to 1965. Van Eeden always employs the same drawing materials, the same formatas and identical frames..He uses Negro leads and pencils, a kind of greasy graphite that allows the artist to achieve dramatic areas of black, on a ragged-edged creamcoloured paper that gives the drawings the appearance of yellowing historical documents. In the same way, the size of the paper is reminiscent of file cards.

He has given his constantly expanding universe the overall title of Encyclopaedia of My Death. This title ? withit hints of romanticism, matching the character of his drawings ? points to the curious mirror-images found in his work. Van Eeden equates the situation prior to his birth with that following his death: a state of complete absence. As he once explained in an interview, "Before you existed, nobody missed you, and after you´re gone, the same will really be true again. That´s an odd idea and it fascinates me". On another occasion, he is qoted sighing, "For me, it´s the most essential state. It´s a kid of ideal state, a sublime stillness. It´s a strange twilight zone: you can´t ignore it, yet you can, more or less. There is something blissful about it. Van Eeden devotes hislife to reconstructing the moment of his death. Accordingly, his work can be wiewed as nothing less than an exorcism of the Grim Reaper through an exploration of the grey area between death and life. Van Eeden takes possession of the past by copying and thereby updating archive photographs. The small size of his drawings emphasises the intimate nature of the enterprise. "when you copy a photo like this", he says, "it´s like walking around inside it. (?) Having to examine it so carefully in order to copy it brings you close to the moment at which the photo was taken. You can almost hear the people in it talking to each other, buy not to you, because yo remain an outsider". He seems painfully aware of the impossibility of actually returning to the past. In copying the photographs, details are lost and other mistakes occur; the heavy, sweeping pencil lines of his drawings often act as veils, partially obscuring the picture of the past. Moreover, copying the photographs isolates the scenes from their original context. The abscence of explanatory labels or titles to the individual drawings lends the subjects a more general significance and makes them highly evocative. In his drawings, his own time and life are conspicuous by their absence, which gives him a philosophical position that makes his work all the more literary. Van Eeden´s world is absolutely safe and not contingent, its destiny has already been fulfilled. Contingency will only be introduced when the draughtsman´s arbitrariness chooses a picture, detemines and projects a detail. His work is a slowly filling reservoir of fragments from his prehistory, a horoic attempt to stop the clock for as long as he is here, and by doing precisely this to focus attention on his existence. Inevitably the day will come when the dam bursts and pent-up time rushes down with gigantic force and surges on its way. And it is all too clear when that day will be: in the year of the artist´s death.

Marcel van Eeden

Drawings 1993 - 2003.
Kurator: Roel Arkestejin
Ground Floor