SAFE 1+2, about the wall paintings
Once you descend into this bomb shelter you lose all sense of direction. All that is left as means of orientation are vertical and horizontal lines of the wall paintings. Even the alphabet is stripped of ‘useless’ elements; for SAFE 1+2 only 'constructive' letters are used (A, K, M, V, W, Y, Z). Employed as arrows pointing towards different directions these letters become signs and question general principles of perception: from the boundaries of visual communication to our capacity to distinguish depth from flatness.
The location and the ‘Sainte Victoire’ exhibitions
The artists' initiative Safe was located under the municipality of the small town of Dalfsen and was initiated by artist Pim Trooster. It's the last one built in the Netherlands, in 1986, as a precaution against the Cold War threat.
Curator Jasper van der Graaf took the title 'SAINTE VICTOIRE' refering to the work of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). Cezanne painted the mountain over and over again, As if he was trying to make a blue print of the mountain. By analyzing the light and structure, and how to paint what he saw, you could say that he was bringing painting back to its essence: as structures related to our way of seeing. According to art historians this is how abstraction was born.
A hundred years later my interpretation of contemporary abstraction accumulates into an approach in which the properties of line, color and space is combined with visual reference to popular culture of city life. On one hand the composition of the wall paintings SAFE 1+2 are constructed in a formal way, at the same time its design emphasizes the dramatic implications of the location in a way similar to advertising on billboards.