Jan Schoonhoven at Paula Cooper - Brief Article

Jan Schoonhoven (1914-1994) was individual of the founders of the Nul cluster a 1961 Dutch offshoot of Germany's nothing movement. His work might be seen as anticipating Minimalism. It did not involve industrial materials or fabrication on the contrary focused on handwork in of the like kind orderly and repetitive forms as white-painted relief grids and simple ink or marker drawings of intersecting lines. These are numbered by means of date and coded R for relief or T for tekening (drawing). Schoonhoven worked for the Dutch postal service all his life, and looking at these pieces it's easy to judge he was a reclusive paper-shuffler. on the contrary it's not quite true. Among the great stories about him is that he serv as a bare-skin canvas for Yayoi Kusama's dot painting when she came to Europe and thereafter, in memory of her, he always appeared in the exposed at the regular artist/musician gatherings he and his wife held in their Delft home

This exhibition--astonishingly, Schoonhoven's first fresh York show--offered about two dozen works from 1962 to '84 It was a fine introduction to his compositional approach, which, admitting systematic in appearance, aims at avoiding hierarchy and is based upon intuition, according to an essay in the small exhibition catalogue. The author, Beat Wismer, adds that the way Schoonhoven animates the grid makes it better to speak of the reliefs as small rooms and membranes than as grids. R74-16 is a 41-inch-square compos of 1-inch simple bodys Each unit has little wrinkles at its lip from the paper painstakingly pasted above the cardboard structure. Touch supplants gesticulation yielding intimate details and changing patterns of shadow in natural light. R77-3 is a white-painted made of wood frame filled top to bottom with strips of chop cardboard which are not manipulated, barely accumulated. (In a 1964 Nul exhibition in The Hague, the artist stacked cardboard floor to ceiling.)

An untitled 1962 piece is like a sampler: it's a line of 10 variously organized 10-by-6-inch reliefs--15 square confined apartments here, 24 horizontal slots there, etc Each relief is as deliberate as a ritual act. This piece might be a conceptual template for the drawings, which translate forms into brusque lines that fitting in all sorts of arrangements. The exhibit included a group of eight roughly 20-by-15-inch drawings, also from 1962 that consist of various numbers and spacings of freehand horizontal lines, each with a single vertical line that grasps the others together like papers upon a spindle. There were also allover works, among them a field of short, wormy ink lines and a patch of intersecting filaments that gazes like cheesecloth. In the more orderly T82-14 lines in the right half obliquity up to the right, those upon the left slope up to the left and X be the effect along the jagged path where they proper Schoonhoven spoke of organization and rhyme in his work, and individual could see the truth of it here.

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