Outsider art at Rotterdam Kunsthal - 3

The Museum of Everything at the Rotterdam Kunsthal is a mind-blowing experience. There is too much to see, too many worlds to experience. I must ingest and digest in very small bites. The previous exhibits are here and here.

Clive Collender c 1950 (Perth, Australia)
Seemingly random dates document the fifty-year practice of this freeform visual diarist, yet they belie the complexity of a pictorial life-catalogue, whose code is known only to its gentle silent maker.

I am so totally jealous about these crisp, clear and endearing artworks. How I wish I could draw like that! But I wouldn't know where to begin. This is charming but also thought provoking. The wold looks simple, but only at first sight. At second sight it's full of mysteries.

Clive and his brother, Ian, were both born with hearing and sight impairments and from the age of 4 and 4 ½ years-of-age they attended a specialist boarding school in Cape Town which supported children with disability.

It was at Boarding School that he commenced his lifetime of art, inspired by letters sent to him by his father. As the brothers couldn’t read, Fred would draw pictures which told the story of what their older brother, Richard, their mother, Ellie, and he were doing. Clive would then respond with his own letters filled with drawings.

Sources:
http://www.kunsthal.nl/en/exhibitions/the-museum-of-everything/
http://www.musevery.com/exhibition6/artists/
a-love-of-drawing-has-resulted-in-a-lifetime-of-storytelling-through-art

Dario D’Aronco at Tale of a Tub

Dario D’Aronco is an interesting artist that I like to follow and to mis-interpret. Thus I'm very sad to have missed his Rotterdam exhibition in Tale of a Tub. So I'm forced to re-live the exhibition indirectly, through texts and pictures from the internet.

Spread through the exhibition space are enigmatic, misshapen objects.  They are disquieting as they hover between artificial and biological domains. We don't know if we're looking at a skull, or the inside of a walnut. Something has been alive but now it is dead and empty. And at the same time it's full of meaning.

Flower Kidney, 2016, Polyamide 3d print from ultrasound scanning, wood, fabric, acrylic paint, camouflage spray paint

But that meaning is very different from the first impression. The object is a 3D print of the artist's kidney, imaged by ultrasound scanning. The artist went to the hospital and collaborated with the radiology department. It's not a dead object, it's the echo of a very alive object.

Still the object is disquieting. Now we're looking in a mirror showing our own biology, our invisible vital organs, made tangible. Like the baroque sculptures where the mortal decay is shown under beautiful skin.

The Touch, 2016, Resin 3d print from laser scanning, spray paint, wood, fabric, acrylic paint

The finger points. There is direction and meaning. But is it pointing right now, in our space and time or are we looking at a relic? An echo of our own radio transmissions coming back from space. A finger pointing at signal in the noise, patterns in the cosmic background radiation.

Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/ - Pictures by Luciana Caputo
http://a-tub.org/onsite/universal-indicator/
http://www.lost-painters.nl/tale-of-a-tub-dario-daronco-universal-indicator/
http://dariodaronco.com/
http://garagerotterdam.nl/nl/catalogi/24/kunstenaar/132/ - Pictures by Bas Czerwinski.