Ton Zwerver at Tanya Rumpff - Haarlem, Netherlands - Review of Exhibitions

Ton Zwerver's career began a decade or in like manner ago with "Living-Room Sculptures," temporary works in which he piled and balanced whatever he place in someone's home - furniture, bric-a-brac, clothing. He photographed each assemblage in situ. The pieces subsequently exist solitary in that pictorial form.

He has gone upon to make more elaborately staged installations in abandoned buildings and to likewise protect them in photographs. He calls each arrangement a "Sculpture for the Moment" They share with the "Living-Room Sculptures" a provisional character distinguished by dint of precarious balance or surreal juxtapositions of uncompounded bodys but now he adds to the phenomenons he finds on the view In sites that reveal histories of occupancy and abandonment, his installations - as we know them from the photos - achieve a remarkable quality of stilled narrative. The best display a powerful, if gloomy symbolism that often incorporates a striking sensuousness.

For example, the Cibachrome titled 19041993 plastic art for the Moment, The Lodging House, Aberdeen, Scotland present to views in a gray-floored room with peeling gold-colored walls, a bare mattress upon a wheeled, metal-frame bed piled with a tangle of r water stockingss A stuffed raptor leans from the bedframe as if ready to attack something upon the floor. The hoses race off the bed and push of great depth into four single shoes, the one and the other men's and women's, that stand isolated in muddy plashs on the floor as if approaching or departing the bed.

Another work, titled 1206 1993 statuary for the Moment, Kloosterkazerne Breda, at hands a large, dim room that must be at the top of a building, because a steep-pitched cover rises from just above a line of perhaps knee-high windows. A place of concentric circles painted upon the floorboards at the center of the scope suggest that this might have been a seminary gymnasium. Placed here and there along the circles are large glass flasks containing water, each picking up and transmitting the daylight from the distant windows. At the cutting side of the innermost circle, a sapphirine overcoat stands as if alive, alone and wanting; its arms are outstretched as it ordeals the floor with fragile glass crutches.

In the pair these images there is a sharp contrast between intense daylight and shadowy interiors. The theatrical qualities of illumination, the vague sadness of the dusty or battered settings, and the concussion of an extraordinary object put among ordinary ones combine in the photographic image to draw single into a world.

That's not for a like reason in photos showing some novel "Sculptures for the Moment" Zwerver made in the abiding-place of two Amsterdam artists. Here like items as masks and a rubber gorilla suit call too a great deal of attention to their own eccentricity. Zwerver also showed three actual statuarys wire volumes that he regarded as "viewers" to populate the gallery. They were attached to the wall or ceiling, which gave them a dislocated feeling familiar from the photos on the contrary here expressed in an entirely fresh way. These pieces are not in the way that seductive as the photos, notwithstanding perhaps a promising avenue for him.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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