Bas Ketelaars

THE EDGE IN THE MIDDLE:

THE LANDSCAPE STUDIES OF BAS KETELAARS

Tim Ingold

We humans, by nature clumsy and flat-footed, abhor the edge. It blocks our path, trips us up, catches us unawares, even threatens us with oblivion should we come too close. Life is an inherently risky business, but it is at the edge that the risk reaches its peak, placing the greatest demands on our attention. We have to watch out! It is hardly surprising, then, that we seek to ease our passage through life by smoothing things out where we can, and by pushing every edge towards the horizon. Other animals seem not so troubled by edges as we are. Four-footed beasts can readily leap across them, serpents slither over them. For seabirds, the cliff-edge – which spells calamity for a human who comes too close – is ideal for launching into flight, even on the down-current. In the subsurface world of a burrowing creature, such as the mole or the earthworm, there are no edges, only corners. And flying insects are likely too small and lightweight to be troubled by what we might perceive as edges at all.

Place the human eye in a landscape, however, and it will invariably seek a path that circumvents the edges it encounters, giving them as wide a berth as possible. Where there is a road, it instinctively follows. There are nevertheless situations, in dense woods, in thick grassland or on rocky shores, when the eye sees only edges, without even the barest patch of firm, level ground to be discerned. At first glance, such an edgy landscape seems impassable. Where to place your feet? With roots, tufts and stones strewn all around, even getting about becomes a balancing act. To keep one’s balance calls for care and dexterity, and a strong nerve, giving a literal meaning to the mental state of being ‘on edge’. Again, this scarcely troubles the animal. Have you ever seen an animal struggling to keep its balance? How often do they trip and fall? Virtually never. Perhaps this is because animals usually have the good sense to remain in habitats to which they are motorically adapted, rather than venturing into those to which they are not.

Edgy landscapes undo our romantic dreams of being at one with nature. These are not landscapes in which we can afford to relax. Those grassy slopes and greenwoods, with their smooth contours, which look so timeless and serene when viewed from afar, become increasingly discomfiting as we approach. Something about them nevertheless draws us in. Edges become lines, tangled in a mesh that closes in around us and holds us tight, as if spellbound. Yet these landscapes also burst with life, and their edginess testifies to the force of their explosion. A pine sapling, its boughs bristling with needles, bursts from the ground as if a shell had landed there, rocks shatter into brittle shards, rain splatters every surface. In an exploding landscape, edges once banished to the limits of habitation obtrude from its very core. There is a seasonal dimension to this, however. Winter snows smooth over the cracks and ice seals them, until they break open again in the spring. But stripped of leaves, deciduous trees stand gaunt against the snow, their bark wrinkled like an old man’s skin.

Edges, moreover, come and go with the light. We often see them only thanks to the micro-shadows they cast on the surfaces of which they are formed, especially when the illumination strikes these surfaces at a shallow angle. That is why landscapes are so much more edgy at dawn and dusk than in the middle of the day, when the sun is highest in the sky, or on moonless nights when there is no illumination at all. But it is also why edginess is susceptible to variations in weather, ranging from brilliant sunshine to thick mist or dark storm-clouds. It is not that clouds block out the light – were they to do so, every passing cloud would have the same effect as an eclipse of the sun! Rather, their moisture scatters the sun’s rays in every direction. We might be surprised to discover that while surfaces exposed to direct sunlight are dimmed when the sun goes behind a cloud, those surfaces that had been in the shade in fact lighten up. What fades is not the light itself, but the contrast.

It is these contrasts, of course, that make a photograph, literally a light-drawing. In his book The Pencil of Nature – the first volume of photos ever published – William Henry Fox Talbot explains that ‘the picture, divested of the ideas which accompany it, and considered only in its ultimate nature, is but a succession or variety of stronger lights thrown upon one part of the paper, and of deeper shadows on another.’ One of Talbot’s prints is of a haystack, with a ladder leaning up against it (Figure 1). We know it as a stack from the outline of its occluding edges. The uprights and rungs of the ladder, exposed to the summer sun, show up as white lines, while the shadow it casts on the side of the stack is picked out in black. Yet what absorbs the eye is the fine-grained stippling of light and shade, which tells us that the stack is of hay. We know this texture well, from its feel when we run our fingers over it. Run a finger over the photographic plate, however, and it feels nothing.   

Figure 1: ‘The Haystack’, by William Henry Fox Talbot, reproduced from The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844, Plate X).

It is the same with the landscape photographs of Bas Ketelaars. Dispense any notion of what the photo is of, and every image is but a composition of light and shadow, pencilled by no human hand, but by nature herself, bursting forth in a weather-world teeming with life. This is natura naturans, a world undergoing perpetual birth, rather than natura naturata, the timeless, ready-formed landscape of the scenic view. We are all too familiar with the textures of this world: the matted grasses, jagged stones, wrinkled tree-bark, twisted roots and needle-bristling boughs. We know what it feels like for hands and feet to tackle the rough edges of the landscape, leaving our eyes to concentrate on smoothing a passage. On the photographic plate, however, these priorities are reversed. Its plane, glossy surface affords seamless passage to the fingers, within the bounds of the rectangular frame. But now the eyes are glued to the intricacies of texture. It is as though, on the photo, touch and vision have swapped places. While the plate is smooth to touch, it puts vision on edge.

Ketelaars began each of his landscape studies, however, not with photography but with drawing. What difference does it make, then, if a hand, and not nature, holds the pencil? Here, every edge, rather than appearing as the outline of a shadow, is rendered in graphite as the trace of a manual gesture. On a photographic plate, the outline is instantaneously snapped along its entire length, as is the shadow-edge in the landscape in the moment the sun emerges from behind a cloud. But the drawn line is not. As a gestural trace, it embodies a certain duration. This is the duration not only of a bodily movement, but also of the attention with which, in drawing, it corresponds. Is this why, though the camera can capture a scene with a verisimilitude unachievable by hand, the drawing often seems truer to our perception? Caught in the eye of the camera, nature freezes. It takes not one but a series of frames to regain the movement of its incipience. But the act of drawing, as it creeps up on nature, partakes of its continual birth.

Surfaces So Near and Yet So Far: Surfacing Landscapes Through Photography And Drawing 

Helen Westgeest

We commonly look at landscapes from a distance, but we experience walking through nature from up close, as the world that immediately surrounds us. When trying to gain access to a landscape, we stop and pause to contemplate the panorama in front of us, yet when walking in nature we also need to avoid tripping over roots and rocks, which requires a slightly downward look. The Dutch visual artist Bas Ketelaars has explored the latter perspective in his photographs and drawings, giving rise to the characteristic close-up views in these works, which strongly contribute to their contemplative style.

When roaming woods and forests, we walk through and step on all sorts of textures of organic and inorganic materials that most of us will hardly be able to identify. This does not seem to bother us, however, as we enjoy being out in the open and take in the world around us. In his photography, Ketelaars concentrates on capturing this particular experience. His close-up photographs and drawings present textures of soil, stone, moss, plants, and trees, but without specifying these materials. In this essay, I investigate the different ways of looking encouraged by his artworks, also by exploring his use of photography and drawing as media.

The particular interest of Ketelaars in landscapes follows in a long tradition in the history of Dutch art. The term “landschap” [landscape] as a genre in art was used for the first time by the Netherlandish painter and author Karel van Mander in his Schilder-boeck (Book of Painting), published in 1604. In this study, Van Mander mainly describes the use of landscape as background for biblical or mythological scenes, but he also suggests the option of landscape as a painterly genre in its own right.ⁱ In the next four centuries, landscape painting would grow increasingly popular among Western-European artists. Their approach of landscapes, however, was largely infused by “distance,” in order to be able to contemplate a more comprehensive sense of landscape. This is not the kind of approach followed by Ketelaars. His close-up views in fact lack any illusionistic depth. As such, his artistic practice calls forth philosopher Edward S. Casey’s concept of “Earth-Mapping.” In his similarly entitled study, Casey rethinks art as a form of mapping. He bases his definition of mapping on a quote by landscape architect James Corner from his 1999 essay on “The Agency of Mapping”: “Mapping [is about] digging, finding, and exposing on the one hand, and relating, connecting, and structuring on the other … in this sense, mapping is returned to its origins as a process of exploration, discovery, and enablement … like a nomadic grazer, the exploratory mapper detours around the obvious so as to engage what remains hidden.”ⁱⁱ

Ketelaars’s artistic way of working is quite similar. On his hikes through woods and forests in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Poland, Lithuana, and elsewhere, he will deploy his camera largely to engage in “earth-mapping.” In his studio back home, he subsequently isolates and blows up particular details from these photographs, transforming them by means of graphite pencils into large and detailed line drawings. This stage also involves a kind of mapping. Casey describes “drawing” quite literally as the act of drawing a pencil across a sheet of paper. In order “[t]o know the surface of anything – not just paper, but the earth itself as a geographic surface – we must drag a physical body directly over that surface in such a way as to trace a path there, make a trail.”ⁱⁱⁱ 

The resulting drawings encourage the spectator to glance over their surfaces. This means that one is not drawn into some illusionistic depth, but it is also true that this act of looking will differ from reading a map with the intention of gaining information on routes to be followed. Instead, the spectator is encouraged to engage in an act of mapping, in the abovementioned original sense of the process of exploration and discovery. Although looking from a fixed point of view at a landscape drawing based on an illusionistic effect of depth appears to be a “natural way” of looking, this is rather a convention of looking at a representation. As argued by landscape historian Marc Treib, in his critical reflection on linear perspective, studies have established “that the eye moves differently when it is scanning a scene – the so-called saccadic movement – than when it is tracking a specific object,” adding that “the eye is always in movement, even when seated, even when at rest.”^iv

If Ketelaars’s mapping concentrates on surfaces, he does not aim to classify them; rather, he adopts a meta-perspective on the surfaces of the forests he visits in order to reflect on these surfaces. As a result of his using black-and-white (analogue) photography and only black graphite pencils in various degrees of hardness, any color differences are eliminated. The different shades of grey in the photographs are transformed into very small pencil lines. Strokes of the pencil may represent cracks in soil, stone, or bark, as well as blades of grass, or nerfs of moss or ferns, which are all basically linear structures that form heterogenous surfaces. Through reducing the materiality of organic and inorganic materials to lines, their outward shape is not marked by their outlines. The drawings basically present “surface details of landscapes,” or rather “the skin of landscape” as a result of earth-mapping.

If drawing and photography both have a history of representation in black-and-white, it is surprising that these media are rarely discussed in tandem. Photography tends to be discussed in relation to painting and film, while drawing is most often addressed in relation to painting. Of course, the slowness of the technique of line drawing sharply contrasts with the little time it takes to make a photograph. While photographs are commonly referred to as “frozen moments,” drawing is rather associated with a process of becoming, much like walking involves a process.^v Both media, however, are valued for their full transparency. A photo camera will record everything that is visible in front of the lens, much like a line drawing will leave every pencil stroke visible for the viewer. And if landscape photography may be considered as more “objective” than landscape drawing, it is noteworthy that photography theorist Liz Wells characterizes landscape photography as dealing with a sense of location, related to complex articulation of assumed objectivity within a personal vision. Wells explains this paradox in reference to a phrase from art historian Lucy Lippard: “living the ordinary while sensing the extraordinary.”^vi Moreover, the term “trace” is often used to characterize both photography and drawing as “presenting traces,” if in different meanings. A photograph is considered to be a trace of what was in front of the camera, whereas a drawing shows traces of the act of using the pencil. In a similar vein, Ketelaars’s photographs and drawings may be interpreted or understood as “traces of surfaces.”

The importance of surfaces in the work of Ketelaars brings to mind historian Joseph A. Amato’s fascination for surfaces in his in-depth study Surfaces: A History. How, exactly, does the notion of “surface” feature in the case of Ketelaars’s project? Of course, the many kinds of surfaces he perceived in the woods and forests figure prominently in his work, but one should also refer here to the surfaces of paper and pencil, as human-made materials that rely on two natural materials: cellulose (taken from trees) and graphite (from stone). Moreover, the digitized analogue photographs are printed on paper with a quite rough surface. Amato argues that humans can be understood as “a set of surfaces living among other, greater, and more varied sets of surfaces.” And even more in general he claims: “As coverings and epidermises – homogeneous and heterogeneous, permeable and impermeable, permanent and transient – surfaces constitute an immediate and tangible geography of the world and a prima facie index of all its different things.” This motivated Amato to investigate human interactions with natural and human-made surfaces.^vii He actually draws analogies between earth and body, nature and human handiwork, cracks in clay and wrinkles in human skin.^viii If the experience of walking through a forest usually includes perceiving forms, colors, and smells, Ketelaars aims to ignore these various sensorial stimuli in his photographs and drawings by foregrounding surfaces instead. The nature of these surfaces is often hard to identify, which may remind us of Amato’s observation that surfaces “both reveal and veil things … [and] appear and vanish.”^ix

How, then, do the physical photographs and drawings by Ketelaars position themselves in-between the physicality of the forest and the presence of the spectator? I suggest that they should be positioned in the so-called “contact zone,” a concept coined by literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt to identify zones where heterogenous elements meet each other halfway in a dynamic relationship, rather than that they merge.^x Although we will enjoy walking in a forest, as humans we differ too much from the environment to be able to merge with it. In this respect, the editors of Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision have put forward the interesting observation that humans consider landscape as “always already there,” which leads to “the perplexing ironies of landscape: it is regarded as natural and eternally present, and yet it is also ignored as if it did not matter.”^xi Ketelaars’s photographs and drawings create a “contact-zone,” enabling the landscape and the spectator to meet each other halfway in a dynamic relationship.

The spectator may be attracted to the surfaces of the drawings and photographs in order to understand what one is looking at. However, the lines and tones will then be perceived as increasingly abstract. This experience made me think of an “eye-opener” experiment by geographer John Wylie in collaboration with artist Catrin Webster, which consisted of making drawings of landscapes en plein air. Wylie’s final conclusion about this project is thought-provoking in particular. He experienced “a sense of landscape as perhaps sometimes near and intimate, but as always nonetheless in some way distant … so near and yet so far.” Elsewhere in his essay he described his experience of “drawing-into-the-world” as a “drawing-out.”^xii In the case of looking at Ketelaars’s photographs and drawings, this experience even gains in strength due to the differences in size: the blown-up details in the drawings next to the often hard-to-identify scale of the landscape photographs. In particular the double-exposure photographs could be either structures of branches of trees or blown-up textures of rocks or even mosses. When combined in the present photobook, the variety of scales is even more striking – paraphrasing Wylie – through the switching between “so near and yet so far.” As a result, glancing through this photobook evokes associations with how geographer Denis Cosgrove has described the use of an atlas:

Its user can leaf through the atlas in any direction and across scale changes, connecting images to each other in innovative and imaginative ways. Nonuniformity of scale permits mobility: a virtual journey over and across earth space, which is vastly more flexible than physical movement because it permits simultaneous activation of scale, direction, and distance. The atlas may be regarded as a tool of mobility for picturing and witnessing global landscape.^xiii

Ketelaars’s photographs and drawings invite us to identify his artistic practice as a specific way of earth-mapping. The reduction to black-and-white tones and the small strokes of his graphite pencils encourage us to look at the surfaces of these artworks as traces of surfaces of landscapes of an unidentified scale. In this respect, we should understand the “edges” (as in the book’s title, Edges of Landscape) not only as outer boundaries of the drawings and photographs that frame the bottom edges of landscape, but also as pertaining to the very surfaces of the photographs and drawings, as existing in-between the spectator and the represented surfaces of the landscapes – “so near and yet so far.”

Eeuwig licht.

Sandra Smets  AMC Magazine

Het vreemdste was het licht dat nooit weg ging. Het kon Bas Ketelaars (1979) in de bossen gebeuren dat hij tijdens het mountainbiken ineens besefte dat het al voorbij middernacht was. Hij was al bijna drie maanden in Finland toen in september 2011 's nachts weer wat duisternis begon in te treden. Maar toen ging hij alweer terug naar Nederland, naar Rotterdam, om ook daar door te werken met zijn abstracte papieren plastieken. De artist-in-residency in Vaasa was goed voor hem geweest omdat hij er los van alles, in die eindeloos lange dagen als in een cocon had kunnen werken. De enige ontsnapping was de natuur, uitgestrekte bossen – geen parkachtige aanleg of flauwekul met bospaadjes, enkel ongereptheid.

Dat licht en die onherbergzaamheid kun je terugzien in zijn Finse bostekening die het AMC kocht. “Heb je gezien hoe het papier opbolt?” vraagt Ketelaars in het Rotterdamse café waar we praten over zijn werk. Afspreken in zijn atelier kon niet: Ketelaars vertrekt de volgende ochtend voor vier maanden opnieuw richting het noorden en heeft zijn woon- en werkplek uitgeruimd. Hier in Rotterdam maakte hij zijn Finse landschapstekeningen. “Die van het AMC was de eerste van vier. Daarin was ik veel aan het experimenteren, uitproberen, gummen, opnieuw proberen. Ik vind het mooi dat je die sporen ziet en dat het papier erdoor van de muur kwam te staan.”

Dat bevalt Ketelaars wel, alsof het toch een beetje die donkergrijze abstracte papiersculpturen zijn die hij voor deze landschappen even in de wachtstand heeft gezet. Die lijn had hij ingezet sinds hij in 2009 zijn kunstopleiding aan de Sint Lucas Hogeschool in Antwerpen afrondde. Misschien was het wel dat donkere palet, denkt Ketelaars, dat hij was uitgenodigd om naar Vaasa te komen. Meer aanknopingspunt had zijn werk niet met dat verlaten romantische landschap onder de arctische boomgrens.

De foto's die hij er tijdens zijn fietstochten maakte – honderden, duizenden, sd-kaarten vol – legde hij thuis in Rotterdam dan ook terzijde. Tot vorig jaar. Zonder directe aanleiding zette hij zijn computer aan om te ze te bekijken. Waarom nou net deze vier foto's hem aanspraken, kan hij moeilijk uitleggen. “Ze hadden een eenduidige compositie, er speelden geen andere verhalen in mee, ze hadden iets allesomvattends.” Vier foto's zou hij, om beurten, gaan projecteren op groot tekenvel van anderhalve meter hoogte, om vervolgens, beetje bij beetje, alle geprojecteerde vlekjes en takjes en lichtjes na te tekenen.

De tekening van het AMC heeft een ronde compositie: onderin mos en kreupelhout, aan weerszijden bomen, daartussen takjes, vlekjes, lichtjes die altijd de ruimte vulden in die eeuwig verlichte Finse bossen. Als landschapstekenaar – wat Ketelaars ineens geworden was – kun je in feite twee kanten uit. Je kunt je een groots en meeslepend panorama neerzetten waar mensen zich in willen verliezen. Of je kunt het houden bij lijn en vorm, de verleiding van de suggestie negerend. Als vanzelf deed Ketelaars, voorheen abstract werkend, dat laatste. Om het overzicht te vergeten ging hij dicht op de muur staan om enkel de contouren na te tekenen van alle twijgjes en vlekjes op de projectie. Hij deed dat laag over laag, eerst de contouren, dan strepen, eerst boven, dan onder, enzovoorts, bijna zoals fotografie of photoshop beeld opbouwt: filter over filter. Soms met liniaal, dan uit de losse hand, meestal in grafiet, heel soms houtskool, tekende hij een compositie uit vol lagen en delen met elk een ander leven, gevoel, identiteit.

Die bewerkelijke aanpak had nog een reden: de eeuwigheid van de Scandinavische natuur staat haaks op een snapshot. “De snelle afdruk van de foto wilde ik terugtekenen,” legt hij uit. “De momentopname ongedaan maken, het gevoel terugbrengen van je zo ver verwijderd voelen in die bossen aan de rand van Europa. Er moest traagheid in.” Streepje voor streepje werkend duwde hij tijd in de tekening maar ook de atmosfeer van die eeuwige zomerdagen en -nachten. Het zijn herinneringen aan de rand van Europa, waar je niet van je mountainbike moet vallen want niemand vindt je. Die onherbergzaamheid zit ook in de tekening: geen pittoresk doorzicht maar een grijze en hermetische natuur vol microscopisch leven dat zijn eigen weg gaat.

Hoewel het in Rotterdam 's avonds wel donker is, werkte hij er vooral dan aan, vanaf een uur of acht, tot voorbij middernacht, bij het onnatuurlijke licht van de projector. Drie maanden lang, bijna elke avond. Is zo'n intensieve aanpak heel zen of eerder juist frustrerend? Boosheid zit erin, geeft Ketelaars toe. “Maar uitgespreid in lagen, zodat kijkers het er niet meer aan afzien,” glimlacht hij. En nee, sneller kan echt niet. “Er was ook een tekening waarbij ik haast had. Het vlak moest vol. Een tekening in twee maanden maken, dat gaat dus niet. Daar ben ik niet tevreden over. Maar dat is een andere tekening. Niet deze.”

Intussen lijken woede of haast niet echt bij hem te passen, rustig als hij zit te praten met achter hem ergens zijn leeggeruimde appartement en atelier. De volgende ochtend zal hij voor een maand naar Litouwen vertrekken en aansluitend drie maanden in Finland verblijven – dat landschap zou een blijvertje kunnen zijn. Maar nee, een plan heeft hij niet. En bagage ook niet veel – papier kun je daar ook kopen. “Ik neem een paar potloden mee. Verder zie ik wel.”

Distant Light

Zondag 30 april 2017

Goede kunst legt niets uit maar laat ons stilstaan bij een gekaderde toestand die ons gemoed beroert zonder dat we exact weten waarom.

Toch wil ik iets zeggen over het werk en de werkwijze van Bas Ketelaars en zijn ‘gastkunstenaar’ Frans van Lent. Hier in dit landschap, bijna bij de zee, aan het einde van een weg, in deze IK constructie voor kunstenaars, gerealiseerd door Jan van Munster. Waarvan we weten dat ook in zijn werk licht en donkerte, zichtbaarheid en onzichtbaarheid en ‘energie’ zijn gevisualiseerd.

Bas Ketelaars maakt voornamelijk werken op en eigenlijk ook van papier. Eerst abstract en later ook landschappen, maar niet een beeld of zgn ‘plaatje’ daarvan op afstand, maar een landschap waar je in bent, zoals je dat ook letterlijk ervaart aslof je in een dicht bos loopt. Hij doet dat zelf in de noord Scandinavische natuur in de periode dat de zon niet ondergaat en in het bos toch de duisternis is en registreerd dat met een camera, waarvan hij de beelden in het atelier projecteerd op grote tekenvellen en transparant papier.

Grote tekeningen waarin je kunt verdwalen en je zelfs kunt verliezen. Zo gedetailleerd en dicht kunnen ze zijn, laag over laag, dan weer weggegumd en opnieuw met grafiet zeer verfijnd bewerkt... soms tot het papier het bijna begeeft. Het gevoel in een zwarte diepte te zijn en toch tegelijkertijd het letterlijke licht van de glans van grafiet op papier te ervaren. De oppervlakte reflecteerd dan het daglicht.

Materialiteit en immaterialiteit fascineren hem. Van de foto, de projectie en de werking van potlood op papier.  Een snapshot en de eeuwigheid van de natuur.... En dat licht, in vele vormen, is vaak het onderwerp van zijn tekeningen. Van minuscuul zuivere cirkeltjes van licht in een zee van twijgjes, takken, bladeren en strepen, tot weggegumde bijna geometrische delen. Laag over laag, vult hij de geprojecteerde beelden in en bouwt hij een werk systematisch op.

En samen met het licht en de duistere natuur is er altijd een constructie van geometrische lijnen en vlakken die in zijn werken de basis structuur vormen. Het abstracte is nooit weggeweest.

Ook in de natuur weten we, is daar de constante van de gulden snede en de fibonaccireeks... van materie en immaterie van licht en duisternis...

En nu in deze tentoonstelling met de titel Distant Light, zien wij binnen kadreringen: matglas – (licht) van een technische kamera... in combinatie met zacht getekend gras en graszoden en daarin evenwichtig verspreide lichtcirkels....rechtstreeks op de muren van dit geometrische gebouw vanwaar uit de natuurlijke omgeving direct zichtbaar is.

Wat een beleving....

Antoinette Reuten

Big Black 2010

Even if you were to stand right in front of the works of Bas Ketelaars, they could still elude you or you’d think that they were not finished. Take, for example, a white empty paper that has been taped to the wall with an enormous amount of transparent tape, as if it wouldn’t stick otherwise. An extreme fastening for a thin sheet. With this the work seems to dissolve completely in its surroundings and the vulnerability of the materials is emphasized.

Ketelaars knows how to connect the materiality and the image with each other with simple touches and uses a mix of techniques for this: sculpture, collage, painting, graphic art, etc. In this manner he has developed a completely personalised working method for his cardboard images. He presses uniform reliefs of about 15 x 15 cm into large cardboard sheets with an etching press. With these he folds tight forms, like boxes. These are then partly broken off, which suggests a formlessness. As if the image can turn into something else any moment and the viewer must be deprived of his footing. It seems as if his works inquire into the relationship between destruction and creation. A serious theme, but well handled with his use of materials and constructive working methods.

It is not easily given to the viewer to penetrate his work. In his drawings Ketelaars literally sets up an obstacle for the observer’s glance. Large, black crossed out spaces with remainders of line drawings underneath cover most of the paper. The drawing seems to be edged out, as if instead of an eraser, he has used graphite. The questions that arise are, whether Ketelaars wants to show us that a definitive image cannot exist or that it is yet to originate? Because he leaves these questions unanswered, it involves the viewer even more in the process of creation of the artwork.

Bas Ketelaars lives and works in Antwerp, where he graduated from the Art Academy of Sint Lucas in 2009.

A.R.