Folkert de Jong
The Immortals
September 1–October 13, 2012
Opening: Saturday, September 8, 6pm
galerie dukan hourdequin
24 rue Pastourelle
75003 Paris, France
galerie dukan hourdequin is pleased to present The Immortals, the first solo exhibition in France by Dutch artist Folkert de Jong (1972).
This exhibition presented at galerie dukan hourdequin shows the project entitled The Immortals made by Folkert de Jong for the Mackintosh Museum/The Glasgow School of Art as part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (20 April–7 May 2012).
“The works collectively titled The Immortals represent a concentrate of a number of Folkert de Jong’s themes. Invited by the Glasgow School of Art to exhibit in April 2012, he took as his starting point works by famed architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, originator of the School’s building. Influenced by the Arts & Crafts movement, Mackintosh’s creative world brought standardisation and a nostalgia for the artisanal together in an association of traditional techniques and the most advanced technology the late nineteenth century had to offer. De Jong shows the architect and his less celebrated artist wife Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh working in a simultaneously avant-garde and highly conservative Victorian setting. The title of the work is the Mackintoshes’ name for the group—also known as The Four—they formed with Herbert McNair and Margaret’s sister Frances.
Folkert de Jong’s groups are irritating: their face-pulling is joyful but it’s also repulsive, and you can’t tell if this is infantile bad behaviour or someone pushing the rules for statue-making to the extreme limit. You can, however, immediately spot who they’re by, given the use of the artist’s favourite material, Styrofoam (and its variant, polyurethane foam), whose frankly industrial look, gaudy colours and strictly chemical makeup situate the work firmly in the domain of the artificial. Used for insulation and for building Hollywood sets, extruded polystyrene possesses contradictory virtues: while easy to sculpt, it is only apparently fragile, with a rot-resistant composition that makes it more durable than wood. A lot of today’s bronze sculptures are cast from initial polystyrene shapes, but de Jong has always avoided this additional, official-art step towards sanctification. Styrofoam was invented during the Second World War by Dow Chemical and is marketed in Europe by IG Farben, former producers of the infamous Zyklon B gas. Thus styrofoam has invisible links with monstrous episodes from recent history. The entire de Jong oeuvre is founded on this kind of undisguised contradiction, in which something seemingly temporary and light-hearted is in fact eternal and intimately related to destruction.
The urge to communicate is one of the primary driving forces in de Jong’s striving to extend the scope of his art and integrate it into life. He has no scruples about availing himself of seductive colours, working with exciting subject matter, caricaturing facial expressions and drawing on more popular forms like the theatre and the movies. His faces are always placed on the floor, with no base, and inhabit the same space as the viewer, who ends up involved in a kind of theatrical relationship with them.
Despite their initial “gore” movie impression, his works focus systematically on historical events or established art masterpieces, speculating about issues like power, reputation, exploitation, morality and the human being’s capacity for self-destruction. The history of sculpture is the history of commemoration, of the monument raised to mark a great battle or pay tribute to a king or a religious dignitary. This is why de Jong never treats his subjects gratuitously, and draws each work’s raison d’être from its context. He carries out detailed research, then uses stereotypes rooted in a popular culture shared by his audience to set viewers thinking about how advertising, TV and so on influence us on a daily basis.
Vivid as they may be, de Jong’s groups always emanate an elusive melancholy. His carnival energy is often marked by decline and degradation: death lurks in these frozen, tar-spattered faces, and the use of contemporary materials contrasts with the implicit nostalgia of subjects lifted out of the past.
All these paradoxes make the de Jong oeuvre a source of endless reflection: at once irritating and alluring, irreverent and cultivated, vulgar and sophisticated, it lies somewhere between the clangour of trashy statues and mute anguish, between contempt for his materials and delight in their use.”
–Extracted from the text of the catalogue written by Sébastien Gokalp, curator (April 2012).
To tie in with the exhibition, a catalogue has been published.
This exhibition and the catalogue are produced with the support of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Paris.
Folkert de Jong (Egmond aan Zee, NL, 1972) completed residencies at the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam) and ISCP (New York). He exhibited at Musas Museo de arte de Sonora (Mexico), The Groninger Museum (The Netherlands); Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis (US), The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (US). His work was recently included in The shape of things to come: new sculpture, Saatchi Gallery London (UK), The October Issue, Modern Painters at Louise Blouin Foundation, London (UK) and The Best of Times, The Worst of Times – Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art The First Kiev International Biennale of Contemporary Art – Arsenale 2012, Kiev (Ukraine).
*Image above:
Folkert de Jong, Mr. and Mrs. Mackintosh, 2012. Polyurethane foam, wood, metal, spray paint. Courtesy galerie dukan hourdequin, Paris. Studio Folkert de Jong, Amsterdam. Photo: Aatjan Renders.