Jeroen Koolhaas
With a career encompassing many disciplines, Jeroen Koolhaas’ work dances around the edges of a social, commercial and an autonomous practice. Overarchingly, there appears no solid conclusion to his work but arguably this is its most exciting factor– the tension lies in the question of in the absence of a single solution how does one calculate the next step?
The viewer is privy to the process of Koolhaas’ cognition and understanding, his uncanny ability to notice visual parallels and his attempt to answer this question by simply working through it. Perhaps, the most visually and conceptually evocative example of this is his most recent work. In his series of light sculptures, the elements used for play are very simple, yet the discrete sentience it achieves is ever so complex.
As Koolhaas sees it, “figuratively there could be knowledge and memory even in the cracks of pavements, as they exist as anomalies in the systems that we constructed around ourselves.” Thus, although the series is the product of a long fascination with technology, its mysteries and the hope that it had elicited in the 1980’s, it is just as much about the research into colour present in his other works. The light sculptures, nevertheless, have elevated and subverted this research as the element of movement has been brought into the constraints of a frame. So in the end, what the viewer sees can stand parallel to a crack in a pavement– they are examples of artefacts of human perception.
Jeroen Koolhaas (b. 1977) lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
