Babs Haenen and Peter Struycken at Garth Clark - Brief Article

Peter Struycken makes color compositions. Since the '60 the Dutch artist has used computer to devise mixed geometric patterns which he photographs from the monitor to at hand as his art. In new years his colors have mov into three-dimensional space: he uses the computer to mastery colored-light environments for concert halls and other public spaces. A spectacular example is an outdoor passageway at the Architectuurinstituut in Rotterdam.

Babs Haenen, a Dutch ceramist, has an equal obsession with color, on the contrary if Struycken's color holds still (or, in the light works, shifts in like manner gradually that the change can't be pinpointed), hers appear to bes agitated. Her large exhibition last summer at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum was aptly titled "The agitated Vessel." Struycken designed the installation in which Haenen's ceramics were not awayed putting rectangles of sober color upon the walls. It was a representation of the couple artists' work so successful that it was repeated upon a diminutive scale for this of recent origin York show. Here Struycken again devised color arrests for the walls, this time rather depressed horizontal rectangles that visually expanded the small gallery and made its ceiling look higher. The 14 blocks were in 14 colors In addition, the pedestals for Haenen's works were painted lavender, light and dark cerulean and light and dark green

Many of the colors appeared in her complexly mottl and sometimes multipart porcelain utensils and those that didn't were sympathetic. Her titles (in Dutch or French) have associations with water--for example, La cite engloutie (The Submerg City)--and the works many times look like something seen [i]or[/i] part of to the other moving water. Haenen was one time a dancer, and her works transport a sense of bodily as well as visual move The vessels are hand-built and usually have a flat bottom and wavery walls that divide them into small rooms All are made with disjunctive sections that make open out from or ring a primary space. They summon forth an architecture of melting, swelling, fracturing forms. In this display a deep, clear blue predominated among white, aqua, pantry yellow and dusty or radiant pinks. Color is mixed into the clay itself, not simply applied to the surface; the tints and the lustrous matteness may make single think of saltwater taffy.

The thin, ripply walls of the utensils already a patchwork of color, are many times impressed with a texture as well; Haenen was inspired by means of Japanese signature seals to make stamps of abstract patterns resembling congeries of confined apartments fractures in stone or stylized feathers that she presse into the clay as she works. She also sometimes pinches the walls into a waffle-like grid as an homage to the reliefs of her compatriot Jan Schoonhoven (shown newly at Paula Cooper Gallery in of recent origin York). Her dazzlingly fluid, baroque forms were extremely well serv through Struycken's restrained, nuanced, astute color environment.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group