Martijn van Berkum

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Displayed in a more traditional gallery space, Suspension is a series of drawings by Martijn van Berkum. Suspension presents objects which are unfinished, in-progress or in a moment of uncertainty. Here is a covered statue, there a series of mysteriously floating pieces of furniture, there a strange structure made of tools used for construction work. In terms of style, these geometrical forms recall De Stijl, the Dutch avant-garde movement of design, architecture and art of the late 1910s-1920. One of the drawings, for example, is a sort of working table or an instrument that could have appeared in one of Mondrian's paintings or even been a Mondrian maker. For Theo van Doesburg, the leader and theoretician of De Stijl, “the controllable form for painting, sculpture and architecture” was the dominant leitmotiv. In other words, theirs was an attempt to achieve purity and a strict control of forms. Although van Berkum refers to the movement, he relocates it within an uncertain and impure space. One could say that he uses this rhetoric inside a negative space: while De Stijl was part of a modernist ideology where painting and mathematics were working hand in hand, van Berkum’s abstractions create objects that are not well defined, but instead are floating, literally in suspension. In this sense, they carry at the same time stillness and movement where the most interesting aspects are not to be seen.

Prior to making Suspension, the artist was working with combinations of texts and photos dealing with the idea of landscape. This notion was central to the series This land is a land and a land and a land in which context becomes the framework that allows any subject to locate, interpret and elaborate a sense of hierarchy within the action of viewing. However, this long-term investigation is directly challenged by Suspension, context seems to be erased or in a process of vanishing. It is definitely not absent, but each drawing is an attempt to create an object that tries to transcend its own context. Working directly on a large roll of paper, the artist cut the drawings out after they were completed. Thus, the drawings themselves create their own format, their own invisible context. By evacuating color and the line, the series works with planes and empties, with surfaces and shadows. This allows Suspension to develop jointly a modest form and a very conceptual intention.

Adrien Siberchicot