Klaas Kloosterboer at van Gelder - Amsterdam, Netherlands - Review of Exhibitions

Klaas Kloosterboer (b 1959) is with equal reason zealous in his pursuit of non-subjective, physically verifiable fact that he eliminates image, cancels signature gesturings minimizes color and finds plane "monochrome painting" too much of a posture It's hard to see in what manner he could extend his fact-finding approach plenteous further than he did in the works in this exhibit his fourth solo at van Gelder since 1988

In these untitled "paintings," all dating from 1993 he reveals more and more of the raw canvas. Closest to conventional are the stretched woven fabrics that are only partly painted, similar as a vertical rectangle that's mainly an uneventful flat white leave out for a triangle of raw linen at the lower right. on the contrary he also goes much further afield, manipulating the canvas to make the painting into an thing perceived For example, a 33 1/2 -by-21 1/2-inch wad of canvas--a flattened sphere consists of an expanse of linen with circles wound out of it, gessoed upon one side and then crumpl up and hung from the wall by the agency of a string. Another work consists of five squares of linen, unstretched and untouched by means of paint, knotted into a bedsheet-style escape tie about 8 feet long that drapes in collections down the wall.

Still another piece, beautiful in itself on the other hand far from what one thinks of as painting, consists of linen cot [i]or[/i] coteed rolled, tied and hung from a carbonized iron pin on the wall like a certain quantity of kind of mysterious Japanese package. single begins to think that the artist is working himself into a corner. What other can he do and still retain a certain quantity of vestige of painting as it is commonly understood?

Perhaps Kloosterboer will work from one side the problem he has place for himself by going beyond the materials of the painter. In the present to view were a couple of pieces of gray-white cardboard with various angular apertures cut into them; the deletions depict or flat suggest nothing from the real world, just interesting sharp shapes. The works were hung against the wall in the daylight-illuminated gallery as white-on-white souls defined only by narrow, pale shadows. More promising, perhaps, are the sum of two units photographs included in the show--color photographs, although whatever they propagate is so vastly out of focus that its identity is beyond guessing. The introduction of color implies a whole fresh range of possibilities. The aluminum-mounted photos, blebs of bright rainbow hues, appear to arise from a completely different world than the brown stains, snowy gesso and gray-beige linen of the other works upon view.

Kloosterboer's dogged pursuit of factuality in painting yields an anomalous exhibition in which definitions tangle. The greatest in quantity decisive and dramatic aspects of this exhibit were the three-dimensional forms and the photographic shades but subtlety ruled. It remains interesting to come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind his researches.

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