Life moves among us - Edo Dijksterhuis - nav verschijnen We Are Nature tijdens Art on Paper maart 2023
Aletta Bos’ art emerges where head, heart and hands meet. A somewhat mysterious place without fixed coordinates or paved access roads. Rationalism and emotion are mixed there, according to indeterminate proportions. Ideas congeal, but never fully. The creative process is basically a series of circumventions, either clockwise or counter-clockwise, until making and being coincide – always briefly and elusively, yet the spark is undeniable.
In recent years intuition has become increasingly important. Control, or the appearance of it, that traditionally comes with the naming, categorising and arranging of things has been replaced by trust, a softer power that is less coercive, but definitely no less vigorous. Increasingly, the artist felt, everything is actually already present, merely waiting to be made.
To label Bos’ work ‘esoteric’ would belie its strength and ‘psychological’ would suggest a constrictive, scientific system. However, this art deals with an inner world that partly reflects empirical reality, even imitates it, but also transcends and comments on it. We don’t have direct sensory knowledge of that inner world, but it does dictate how we see, hear, smell and feel the outside world – anyone who has ever woken up on the wrong side of the bed can relate to that. And so our internal world is separated from the reality around us by an invisible but permeable, and occasionally elastic membrane.
The paintings nearly always feature a margin that demarcates the inner world. It can be a semi-decorative scale pattern or an architectural element – something natural looking or something clearly made by human hands. It offers footing and protection, but the margin does not seal off the image. Rather, it invites the spectator in, to recognise and associate.
Everyday objects like lamps and vases can be identified in these interiors, as can windows, plinths or abstract grates. However, botanical forms dominate: seeds, leaves, pods, stalks, rhizomes, bulges and stems. The scale isn’t always obvious and we could suddenly find ourselves at cellular level looking at mycelium or root bacteria. These are manifestations of the more-than-human that surrounds us and sometimes even enters us – think of your intestinal flora, for example. It is extra-human life that is part of our lives that we cannot live without. It is life itself.
That’s the reason we recognise so much in the works without being able to fully identify the elements. We see soft tones next to outspoken colours, strong contours and generous forms, but also: thorny resilience, clumsy timidity, sensuality and humour. It all feels very human and earthly, yet at the same time there’s something under the surface that defies depiction.
The ingredients in Bos’ work attract and repel each other. Everything grinds and rubs together, so a round form may just as well be a petri dish or a lily pad, penises and vulvas coalesce, and a lamp suddenly seems kindred to a sea cucumber. Forms that seemed each other’s opposites, turn out to belong together. They even rely on each other for meaning. Like thesis and antithesis, they are part of a plausible, larger whole: a hybrid organism with fluid boundaries.
A holistic approach like this implies the ditching of old ideas about hierarchy. Humanity no longer automatically tops the pyramid anymore. Even the proverbial pyramid has disappeared. Relations between man and other species are no longer defined by vertical power structures but by coexistence as equals. In recent years, anthropologists have started practicing ‘multispecies ethnography’, which acknowledges the perspectives of non-human species such as animals and plant but also fungi, bacteria and even viruses. This view implies an enrichment of human consciousness, connecting it to life outside the body. It makes man grow but also enforces humility.
In her work Bos keeps searching for these connections between life forms and vital forces. It requires a loose approach, leaving room for coincidence, and the artist’s hand doesn’t always determine what happens. She tinkers endlessly with her compositions; often working on several at a time and in a variety of media. Alongside paintings she also makes porcelain wall sculptures, collages that sometimes try to escape the plane’s surface. She collides and mutates reality and its imagery in a series of boxes, a Gesamtkunstwerk about evolution with the working title It’s hard to see the true for real.
The source material is from illustrated anatomy books, memories or recycled older work. These ingredients are excised from their original context to be rearranged in new constellations. This process is fuelled by a strong desire to understand the way things work: in nature, among humans, between genders, and between spaces. Longing and insight are shared with the viewer, who is nudged in a certain direction by the titles and invited to partake in the conversation.
Bos’ body of work is rapidly becoming more dense. The works increasingly interlink and that increases their power to connect externally with the viewer. The inner world visualised in the art communicates with other inner worlds through a tangible reality. The message isn’t always – or maybe even never – explicable in words, but it can be experienced and intuitively understood.
Edo Dijksterhuis is an art critic / cultural journalist