________ (CHINESE CABBAGE)
Production residency and solo exhibition of Pieter van der Schaaf.
«Since my arrival in Paris, I have been photographing stones on construction sites and in the streets under construction, particularly stones on pallets. What I am interested in is the way they are wrapped: pallets and fasteners emphasize the temporary aspect of their presence. I see the fragments displayed on the pallets as puzzle pieces, parts of an image that cannot be reconstituted.
This absence of the image in its entirety struck me by its correspondence with the museum display, as can be seen in the Louvre, in the archaeology department. In another way, there is also in these fragments an absent part, such as a phantom limb; a desire to represent an incomplete image, an absent set.
I used CHOU CHINOIS as a metaphor for these concepts that interest me. When a Chinese cabbage is cut in half in water, the cabbage will “seek” to reconstitute itself and although this is impossible, this attempt indicates a desire to return to its previous form, by gathering together, like the presentation of artifacts in the museum.»
Pieter van der Schaaf
________
When you arrive at 4 rue Moret, you can see two pallets in the parking spaces in front of the art venue. Fragments of plaster are stored there, waiting for a future construction. Some others inside, fixed to the wall or embedded in plasterboard, seem to draw the multiple planes of a changing space.
Pieter van der Schaaf took a mold of the entire Glassbox floor, deriving a plaster negative from the asphalt that forms the surface of the art space. In the imprint, between the model and its copy, a network of hollow lines has infiltrated, a kind of animal galleries consumed in the plaster and whose shape has been dispersed following the fragmentation of the screed. The fragments are presented on the wall, in the same way as fossils or historical stones, set in custom-made metal legs, while the half-naked plaster rails, as well as the opening of a new corridor and a frame for a partition wall under construction, sketch a new configuration of the space. The exhibition is suspended between different spatial and scenographic potentialities; other blocks, similar to those on display, are waiting for their turn.
To these fragments of plaster, between art objects and building materials, responds the fragmentation of the exhibition space. Just as the fragments seem to be constantly rearranging themselves, in search of a form that is both lost and new, the different potential spaces drawn by the emergence of the partitions superimpose on the same site the possible scenarios for the future morphology of the exhibition site.
Clémence Agnez
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Supported by Fondation Mondrian – Mondriaan Fonds
exhibition view © Florie Berger
