Art van Triest
Central to my work is the human tendency to fight our fundamental fear and insecurity with an order, a system. I see this as a coping mechanism: an attempt to get a grip on the world around us, which stems from a deep need for control, or the illusion of control.
I see this tendency to frame reality in a system on various levels. It is anchored in our thinking: we divide the world around us into categories and use rational constructs to define differences and make connections. This also shapes our world in a concrete sense: from spreadsheets to urban planning and agriculture or architecture.
My work is a visual investigation, in which I question how this frame relates to the physical reality of the world around us. I see the grid as too straightforward a way of relating to reality. With my work I want to offer a visual counterbalance to the simplification and standardization of our environment and way of thinking. I would like to strive for a more realistic positioning of man, in which we can relate to reality in a more complete way.
“Art van Triest questions the linearity of our ideal of manufacturability. As if we can (know) and put everything into boxes. The rational, geometrically determined structure of the grid is the ultimate representative of it for him. (…) it can be found in many subtle and less subtle variations worldwide in city plans and in architecture. For Van Triest, the grid and thus rational, linear thinking is not innocent.”
Architectural historian Astrid Aarsen on solo exhibition Grids in Kunstenlab, 2020.
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untangling grids and other coincidental certitudes
Roy Voragen
The line can connect as much as it can disconnect. When the line becomes a wall, a wall to protect and serve, a wall to keep out, a wall to keep in the wall comes to dominate everything and all. But even a line that becomes a wall that becomes a grid that becomes a citadel will come to leak will eventually become permeable will in turn become leakage and will become excess, excessive excess… How to go on? Should we continue? Should we eject? Reject too? If so, how to exit from this conundrum?
Parts of trees are archived. Other parts are suspended from the ceiling. And other parts are bagged. And we – we map and navigate forests and cities.
Unpredictability frightens us – we rather build empires, we rather go to war and perish, we rather burn down forests and cities, we rather bomb libraries and schools than acknowledge not-knowing, not being able to know how to proceed, what to do. We have built systems of thought governing the land and sea, colonizing continents and archipelagos and dominating peoples domesticating tongues and poetry and art and microbes and minerals.
The sounds of a double bass scather across the vast floor space of the former factory mixing with sounds – noise? – of people coughing, feet waiting, wood meeting metal, and etcetera. And we – we bear witness, time made complicit.
Unpredictability frightens us – we demand that everything and all should be predictably transparent, nothing and no one is to be opaque. Everything and all should be mapped, sized up and made fit a Procrustean bed making life brutish but predictable. And yet, while the Procrustean bed is a powerful image of us fighting off entropy, unpredictability eventually penetrates our systems of thought – even the most powerful system is fragile in the face of time.
Poet Édouard Glissant poses this question to us: ¨does unpredictability constitute a deficiency?¨ After all, the unpredictable penetrates every pores of our being – i.e. relations in and with the worlds we inhabit with human and non-human others – no matter how we might want to try to ward it off out of sheer fear. The unpredictable enters our being, our relations through contacts, clashes, between heterodox elements.
Instead of, at best, ignoring the unpredictable, which guarantees cruelty, poets and artists could share with us a far richer imagination how to cherish and embrace contingency, contradiction, complexity, chance detours and ambiguous multiplicity of the in-between spaces – from the overly familiar to the uncharted – we move in and through, that, also, transgress us (we change through exchange).
This text was written by Roy Voragen in response to Art van Triest´s solo exhibition A City, A Forest (09.11.2024 – 05.01.2025) at Willem II, Den Bosch, the Netherlands, at the invitation of curator Linda Köke. Roy Voragen is a Maastricht-based poet and curator (linktr.ee/royvoragen).