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EXHIBITIONS

Organising the Non Obvious I
ZINGERpresents, Amsterdam, 2010

text by Steven van Grinsven

ZINGERpresents is pleased to announce Organising the Non Obvious I, the debut exhibition of Bas van den Hurk at ZINGERpresents. The artist will for his exhibition bring together an installation of new works that tear away at the formal and formulaic conventions of painting.

“From the fuliginous flatness of the fifties to the pop op minimal sixties right on through the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't seventies”, This blurb lifted from the back flap of my fittingly worn 1989 Black Swan copy introduces? The painted Word1, a book that describes modernism's purported colonisation by a select stronghold of cultural theorists in the latter part of the last century. I purposely throw up this stark but bleak work of social criticism by Tom Wolfe, as when confronted with the work of Van den Hurk the feeling encroaches upon you that your guided through the same tunnel as Wolfe puts you through, in his 120 pages of art world exposé. Where Wolfe mob handily lines his victims up chronologically, Van den Hurk handles his painting like a producer would composing a mash-up; Delicately allowing his protagonists to dance alongside another between the cracks and on the graves of outworn ideological and theoretical models.

Van den Hurks paintings with their unnerving but beguiling sense of déjà vu absorb a multitude of connotations in a non-conformist manner. In many ways Van den Hurk hands his audience the keys to the kingdom. A sequence of recognizable influences CHECK, subversive yet delicate collage elements CHECK, defaced surfaces CHECK, all perfectly palpable and understandable. But whilst the keys to the kingdom are dangling in front of your eyes, like the gold chains and kitsch necklaces that dangle from the canvasses, you become aware you have only entered Level One. By the time you realise your facing an uphill battle closer aligned to Scientology than Kafka, the work starts throwing up a conundrum of philosophical debates about its own presence and validity of existence. Plato, Benjamin, Borges, de Man and all the others whom ask questions that require no answers are brought into play to both clarify and obscure the hidden motives behind the fundamentals of these unassuming modest works. Whilst the keys are still dangling within touching distance, one realises to get to the essence of these works will mean getting to the essence of art, debunked of the fraudsters that Wolfe singles out and away from flat-pack prescribed ideologies, here you are alone, Level One, with some serious auditing to be done and no emeter at hand.

1The painted Word by Tom Wolfe, 1975, originally appeared in Harpers Magazine in April 1975.
2 The Hubbard Electrometer (E-meter) is an electronic device for measuring the state and change of state of humans used in the ‘religion’ of Scientology