Merijn Bolink & Paul Cox at Fons Welters - Amsterdam, Netherlands

Paul Cox (b 1962) is a Rotterdam artist who has achieved a reputation in Holland with a certain number of rather disturbing sculptures consisting of cut-up beds weighted with slabs of solidify or asphalt. In this duo exhibit his most characteristic work was a real revolving door, freestanding and block uped with plaster slabs. Each of the slabs could be seen from sum of two units sides, but that made them no easier to identify: upon one side there were indications of hand forming, of pressing the material into a mold on the contrary the other side was in the way that dirtied and its corners in the way that chipped that the slabs, like the doors, appeared to have been extracted from real life. Cox's other plastic arts took a slightly different tack. A tabletop type for a large work consists of staircases that lead to blank walls or are doubled or inverted. Cox's works explore and crowd together in disorder function; these pieces combine grove glass, insulation foam and polyester resin to circumscribe the stairs in a frustrating space.

Cox's statuarys were upstaged by work in a similar idiom created through Merijn Bolink, an even younger artist (b 1967) from Amsterdam. Bolink chop up a real upright piano and straight chair and doubled them, slicing end each wooden part to make sum of two units thin ones, or separating forest from ivory or metal to make alternative versions of the same part. ultimate parts from the inside or outside of the make appeared in both pianos; upon one the front suggested that it was the original, on the contrary the back of the other had a convincing priority. The lock openers were ivory surfaces on single raw wood and screws upon the other. The brass pedals hung a little limply upon one, while unfinished iron shoots stuck out at the pedal positions upon the other. One chair had stuffing upon the seat, and the other had the eviscerated leather cover

Workmanship is an issue here, I conceive but the piece provoked a maze of contradictory reactions. An impression of medical analysis, of dissection, gave way to feelings of dismay and futility quite in keeping with Cox's thwarted revolving door. Bolink's flaying of the piano appeared to take away its dignity and value as well as its utility. on the contrary just when the message strike one as beinged the bleakest, one recognized a subversive humor, an absurdity not unlike Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup, admitting on a grander scale.

The same ambivalent tone was maintained in Bolink's installation of 14 baby carriages, none of them quite life-size and a certain number of as small as a pair of inches in length, variously made of copse upholstery foam, fabric, cardboard, pressboard, vinyl, wicker, and aluminum tubing. a certain number of were collapsed on the floor like dropp clothes, or, more ominously, as if the substance had been draw into the mouthed out of them. The consequence was certainly not toylike on the contrary poignant or awful, as if a certain quantity of disaster had left the carriages devoid of contents and in disarray. At the same time, the true silliness of, say, a frameless corduroy carriage, and the ridiculous sight of this muddy plash of uselessness pulled one back from visions of destruction to visions of cartoon-style transformations. Bolink's intention may be no more than a tender tweaking of Holland's vaunted practicality and tradition of profitable design. The result, however, in the two pianos and carriages, was a memorable balancing of amusement and despair.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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