DELFIM SARDO

Map, Composition, and Montage

This text was first published in Sequent, Roma Publications, Amsterdam 2006.

There is no direct reason to say this, but Kees Goudzwaard's paintings are akin to music, covering a range that goes from the serial compositional structure to the fluidity of jazz. This innocuous, simple claim is probably related to the most intangible and imperceptible aspects of Kees Goudzwaard's creative practice, since only remotely can the idea of composition in contemporary painting now be based on a comparison to music, which lies at the very origin of the idea of composition and was even its model from the perspective of a certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic. In fact, music does not act as an archetype, but rather as a creative system of reference for Goudzwaard's painting. The artist starts from a set of elements which he recombines until he attains an aesthetically operative model that allows him to find a temporary solution to one of the disputes between the ancients and moderns that lasted throughout the entire twentieth century: the relationship between abstraction and figuration. In 1912, Guillaume Apollinaire established a comparison between Cubism and the history of painting, on the one hand, and between music and poetry, on the other, in order to demonstrate that the fundamental issue of modern painting was abstraction, regardless of any possible recognition of the elements that make up the painting's composition. Likewise, Kees Goudzwaard has found a representational system which derives from the notion of model and is simultaneously centred around a methodology based on an idea of composition and a game-like recognition of the represented. In fact, the compositional form of Goudzwaard's paintings emerges from a score which is worked as a 1:1 scale model and subsequently transferred onto the canvas. This model is, first and foremost, a field in which Goudzwaard structures the formal question that he aims to explore: he uses sheets of coloured paper and sometimes acetate sheets (overlaid or not) attached to cardboard or to each other with masking tape. The model, constructed through an intense combinatory process, is then painstakingly reproduced in the canvas during a second phase of the artistic process, creating a mimesis of the original model and thus establishing a perfect trompe-l'oeil effect. As in a David Mamet movie, the viewer is systematically misled. At first sight, we appear to see a painting in which the strips of tape used to create the colour fields were left in place, but we soon realise that it is merely an illusion, that it is only paint on canvas. This elicits an abstract interpretation that in turn opens the way to the understanding that there must be a model which, albeit never shown, is the field of decision in the working process, and transforms the composition into a precise representation. The time of the gaze is thus both extended - by the interplay of recognition-illusion-recognition - and concentrated, because the long decision-making and preparation process is condensed into a single painting, the sole rendering of the path which the viewer can access.

When I first saw reproductions of Goudzwaard's canvases, there seemed to be an obvious association with two paintings by Piet Mondrian at the K20 collection in Duesseldorf. The latter are particularly relevant here because Mondrian used coloured masking tape instead of the customary painted lines to divide the colour planes. As time went by, they acquired a barbaric, slipshod, fragile and dense character which made them particularly poetic and brought them close to the creative act, triggering a paradox that might be expressed as follows: the further away in time from its origin, the closer, the cruder and the more real that origin appears. The relationship between these Mondrian paintings and Goudzwaard's work is also paradoxical. In fact, starting from models (which I didn't know when I saw the first reproductions), Goudzwaard's paintings have the exact opposite effect of these Mondrians. Whereas in this later period Mondrian used the tapes' own materiality to place the paintings on a different level from the reality of the picture plane, Kees Goudzwaard proceeds antithetically, adopting a diametrically opposite approach which, through a somewhat fallacious reasoning, creates points of identification between the two painters. This complex process of identification via double-negation can be clarified in the relationship between the colour planes and the plane of the lines that separate them. According to David Sylvester's interpretation of Mondrian, brilliant as ever: "A painting by Malevich or Van Doesburg or Kupka is an assemblage of shapes. A Mondrian does not consist of blue rectangles and red rectangles and yellow rectangles and white rectangles. It is conceived - as is abundantly clear from the unfinished canvases - in terms of lines - lines that can move with the force of a thunderclap or the delicacy of a cat. Mondrian wanted the infinite, and shape is finite. A straight line is infinitely extendable, and the open-ended space between two parallel straight lines is infinitely extendable. A Mondrian abstract is the most compact imaginable pictorial harmony, the most self-sufficient of painted surfaces (besides being as intimate as a Dutch interior). At the same time it stretches far beyond its borders so that it seems a fragment of a larger cosmos or so that (...) it acquires a second, illusory, scale by which the distances between points on the canvas seem measurable in miles"1. Point in fact, nor are Kees Goudzwaard's paintings made up of the colour planes themselves (although they are becoming ever more subtle and refined), but of the relationship established by the dividing cream lines. Given that this isolation is created not by a painted line that acts as a symbolic border, but instead by a 'real' isolating line (we literally see this painted strip as a real, tangible tape superimposed on the painting's surface), it defines a realism of scale that is particularly disturbing. According to David Sylvester's accurate judgment, a Mondrian canvas possesses a dual scale: one established by the internal relations between the colour fields and their dividing lines; the other a symbolic map scale. Kees Goudzwaard's painting shares a similar ambivalence, while adding a higher complexity: since the line dividing and isolating the planes operates on a scale we all recognise (we have all seen and used masking tape for all manner of purposes), the intuited infinitude of the straight line (together with the map scale as seen from above) is constantly disguised as an abstract and pictorial composition. In a text on Barnett Newman in which scale is postulated as the fundamental issue of post-war American art, Donald Judd argues that the way in which Newman uses demarcation lines (the so-called "zips") for the colour planes defines an internal scale which allows a small painting to be large scaled.2 Judd's text is based on the need to differentiate Newman's paintings from Mondrian's, specifically arguing that the former does not indicate a hypothetical continuum outside the frame (Sylvester's claim on Mondrian). Nonetheless, this issue of scale takes on a crucial role and cannot be mistaken for a mere problem of size. The scale of a painting can be fixed according to a given set of internal relations. In this sense, Goudzwaard's use of an element whose scale is recognisable within the physical realm produces two kinds of consequences: realistic representation, and an approach to a model which is hypothetically associated to an ambiguous and distant referent but which is quite possibly also related to the sphere of real and recognisable things. What then does the model refer to? Let me clarify this: by definition, a model refers to two levels of reality, as is inherent to its dual meaning. On the one hand, we always see a model as a project, meaning a prototype or a mock-up. This is how we understand architectural models, or the theoretical models that we can apply. On the other hand, model is also understood as retrospective. A map is a model derived from another level of reality, produced from a system of codes (signs of representation, scale, etc.) that enables the 'translation' of something that is real and that can simultaneously be projected into the future. Kees Goudzwaard's models, made up of cardboard, sheets of coloured paper, layers of adhesive tape and overlaying acetates, take on the same dual meaning: they double as both projects for paintings and as fields for translating some other instance, one which evidently includes sets of very diverse matrixes. The most evident are systems of representation in painting and other paintings (namely his own, which consequently become projects for future models), as well as the history of painting, including the aforementioned Mondrian and Newman (the most obvious references) and the trompe-l'oeil tradition.3 A second group of deeply rooted references can be traced back to the notions of the map or of territorial organisation - the concept of territorialized landscapes found in works such as z.t. (2000) and Double Layout (2003). The very notion of land or property redistribution was an integral part of the emergence of landscape painting, especially at its origin in fifteenth-century Central Europe, when the landscape was depicted using precise geometrical figures that performed the political function of signalling ownership of the land.4 Nevertheless, Kees Goudzwaard's interest in landscape as a means of expressing hierarchy of vision is also clearly manifested in his reference to one system of landscape representation that is equally charged with intense political implications: the panorama. Goudzwaard calls some of his works (from 1994, 1996, 1999, etc.) Panorama, no longer as a reference to a plane-related vision, but rather to a sequential vision of "one thing next to another" that reveals his interest in a vision which unfolds like a path, involving a certain temporality that is dependent on movement. The short-lived panoramas created by Robert Barker in the late eighteenth century would be replaced with the emergence of cinema. This development solved the issue of time implicit in the circular structure of the panorama. The neologism coined and patented by Barker in 1788 derives from a Greek expression which means "to see everything". In fact, it does mean to see everything, albeit not simultaneously, since the vast proportions of this last attempt to transform painting into a popular spectacle imposed the construction of complex, cylindrical buildings. In the most ambitious cases, these structures held over 150 linear meters of painting. However, Goudzwaard's reference to the panorama is related to a formal pictorial structure - the use of long formats and large dimensions - and above all, to establishing a horizon that runs across the painting, and whose structure determines a legibility from left to right, as well as a top and a bottom. In his works of this type - not the only ones to show a central dividing line that mimics a notion of the horizon - the compositional structure elicits a movement of the gaze that derives from one of the founding ideas of modernity: the distinction between the visual and the audial perceptive modes. The difference between the experience of seeing (nebeneinander) and the experience of hearing (nacheinander) - famously described in James Joyce's Ulysses through Stephen Dedalus' experience as he walks along Ireland's pebbled beaches - is unquestionably one of the issues that informs Kees Goudzwaard's work and that raises the problem of successiveness (rather than seriality). Hence, Goudzwaard's paintings ponder an idea of instability of movement, since the process of composition that interrelates the horizon and the aerial view engages a constant deconstruction of the apparent linearity of time implied by the painting's format. As such, movement corresponds to a (literal) process of misaligning the viewer's perceptive relation to the painting. This takes two modes: a lateral movement, analogous to reading (from left to right and top to bottom) which follows the grid defined by the painting itself through the borders of the colour planes; a second movement, perpendicular to the first, which comes from the need to approach the picture plane, constructed via the illusionistic process of the trompe-l'oeil, the need to access reality, or the mimesis of representation.

I would like to go back and elaborate on the possible relationship between Kees Goudzwaard's paintings and the notion of a map or chart. His work features a whole set of (unstable) procedures of organising the planes that generate an interplay between the horizontality - of both model and map - and the verticality of the painting. Given the ambiguous nature of its scale, this horizontal organisation of the space also recalls another process epitomised by Man Ray in his rayogravures and by Moholy-Nagy in his photographic work from the 1920s, generally called photograms. A similar compositional process results from the objects that cast shadows being placed either on the enlarger or directly on the photographic print paper. While horizontality necessarily lies at the root of these compositions, gravity is also an influential force, suggesting the fall of objects or the topographic organisation of the planes. Goudzwaard's painting recalls that process through the idea of a fall, the topographic reference, and the apparent disorganisation of the picture plane that grows more from a process of absence than from one of presence. The complexity of this relationship between two- and three-dimensionality can be taken further by considering the architectural composition of his paintings, as they summon up the architecture of Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Some of Goudzwaard's paintings bear similarities to the composition of planes that is closely linked to modernist architecture. Therefore, as will be shown, they signal an inner space covered by a plane that is often seemingly a facade. This architectural metaphor, like all other approaches to a notion of the composite plane, implies an absence that is perhaps the very raison d'etre for the existence of painting. Works such as Klein vanitas (1996) and Rose z.t. (2000) are significant milestones, as their structure emerges from the notion of absence or loss, of that which is not there, of that which has been lost. All that remains is a score of hypothetical tape-marks. The very title of Klein vanitas clearly reveals another constant in Goudzwaard's painting: the idea of death, associated to vanitas, the pictorial model for capturing the ephemeral, which despite its apparent exuberance lies on the verge of decay. Seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting explored a permanent tension between the insignificant and the overrated, and between vitality and the stench of death. In similar fashion, Kees Goudzwaard's painting exudes a feeling of absence, caused by his use of a material that involves the presence of something that has a fleeting and merely instrumental existence in the process of painting: masking tape. Flight of Stairs (2005) even alludes to falling (a possible reference to Marcel Duchamp's famous 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase) with the beige marks of the canvas offering a glimpse of the glorification of insignificance. Roland Barthes, writing on Dutch still-lifes, openly states that there could be no other justification for vanitas than "to lubricate man's gaze amid his domains, to facilitate his daily business among objects whose riddle is dissolved and which are no longer anything but easy surfaces."5 Therefore, yet another layer of complexity is added to Goudzwaard's oeuvre by the tension between the apparent simplicity of the painted surfaces and the dramatic depth of the relationship binding time and loss, as found in vanitas and integrated into his painting. This third layer is a derisory eroticism of painting whose ancestry must inevitably include Kurt Schwitters.

Merzbau, or The Cathedral of Erotic Misery, as Schwitters also called it, resulted from a long process of accumulation. It began with a single column in his studio, and was gradually transformed into a huge inverted sculpture, i.e. it initially grew as papers, clippings and objects that were added to the column, developing into a complex space which could be visited. Schwitters was working the studio, and no longer in the studio which had been transformed into "an abstract (cubist) sculpture, to which one may go and return", as the artist himself wrote in a letter to Alfred H. Barr in November 1936. This accumulation of layers in the several versions of Schwitter's work (first in Hannover, then in Norway and after 1940, in England) would become a central spatial question in the broader issue of three-dimensionality during the twentieth century, providing a relevant framework to understand the deliberate positioning of layers in the paintings of Kees Goudzwaard, who developed a natural interest in this German artist's oeuvre. Indeed, one of the most surprising themes in Goudzwaard's painting is the way in which this layering creates a spatiality that extends beyond the flat picture plane discussed above; one that presupposes a liminal space in-between the picture plane and another that is hidden behind the layers that are its figurative secants. The code of this subtle representational system lies in superimposing strips of masking tape on the surface. The different planes then become explicit through the resulting play of transparencies. Although this happens very rarely, a few paintings even suggest some shadows that correspond to a three-dimensional projection into the pictorial space. One glimpses a very delicate and discreet depth within this space, which Sebastian Hackenschmidt connects to the trompe-l'oeil paintings by seventeenth-century Flemish painters Wallerand Vaillant and Cornelis Gijsbrechts.6 Furthermore, Goudzwaard also creates an interstitial space or - to evoke the concept of liminality defined by anthropologist Victor Turner - a liminal space. Seen from a Bergsonian premise, the complex spatiality of Goudzwaard's paintings embrace an illusion of micro-depth which challenges the notion that painting is all about the surface and which adopts quasi-reality in a somewhat ironic attitude towards that notion. Yet it is equally true that this device introduces a field that has neither a name nor a real space, but that exists instead as a virtual space - a virtuality that we know is the result of an 'enhanced-reality' - whose very temporality makes it extremely unstable. In some works, the juxtaposition of handwritten texts by other people clearly reveals the type of loss that fills this nameless and liminal space. For example, in Facsimile "Rakelings Leven" (1999) these texts tell an intimate, dramatic story whose reading is necessarily fragmented by their density (not to mention the barrier caused by the Dutch language). One might suppose that the text is irrelevant, that the artist used it as if it were blind text, an image. However, this is not completely accurate. In fact, the dramatic nature of the text is crucial to the painting's raison d'être. In other words, although it is not in itself narrative, the painting narrates a story. The space of emotional intensity is caught in an indefinable limbo and brought together by the ever-present strips of masking tape painted as if they were real. The painting is transformed into an exercise of combinations since the viewer - becoming functionally illiterate - cannot establish the connections between the blocks of text. Facsimile "Depression, What it is and How to Cure It" (1998) includes a medical text on depression that was re-arranged in such a way that the lines are too long for our memory's perceptive capacity. The structure of this painting makes it all the more difficult to read since part of the text starts upside down and from the bottom. What's the point of putting so much text in a painting if it's only going to make it harder to read? There can only be one answer: it must be inherent to its meaning, not to its reading. The text was meticulously cut, pasted and silk-screen printed following a precise layout onto a first layer of paint, fixing the meaning in an experience of the time condensed in the painting that does not coincide with the viewer's time of perception. In conclusion, Goudzwaard uses different types of reading (writing scores, text correction, the printed text and the manuscript) in order to construct time processes: the viewer's time of perception is contracted or expanded through the metaphor of the interstitial time within the painting, or the symbolic space of recognition, or the possible space of memory. Hence, he develops a pictorial process which activates a historical memory that falls apart when practising his version of model painting, and proposes a revision of modernity and enhanced sensitivity to what lies 'in-between' chromatic planes, visibilities and perceptions. Ultimately, Kees Goudzwaard's paintings dwell in perception.

Footnotes
1. In David Sylvester, About Modern Art. Critical Essays, 1948-1997, Henry Holt & Company, 1997.
2. "It is important that Newman's paintings are large, but it is more important that they are large scaled. His first painting with a stripe, a small one, is large scaled. The single stripe allowed this and the scale allowed the prominence and assertion of the stripe and the two areas. This scale is one of the most important developments in the twentieth-century art. Pollock seems to have involved in the problem of this scale first. Newman shared attitudes which were leading to the scale and developed it on his own in 1950". Donald Judd, "Barnett Newman", in Studio International, February 1970.
3. See the enlightening text by Sebastian Hackenschmidt, "Beyond disillusion: Kees Goudzwaard and the dialectical tension of painting", in Kees Goudzwaard (exhibition catalogue), S.M.A.K., Ghent, 2005. This text is reprinted here, pp. 53-61.
4. See Martin Warnke, Political Landscape. The Art History of Nature, Reaktion Books, 1994 (chap. 1: "The Occupation of the Plain").
5. Quoted by Hal Foster in "The Art of Fetishism: notes on Dutch Still Life", in Fetish, The Princeton Journal, 1992.
6. Sebastian Hackenschmidt, "Beyond disillusion: Kees Goudzwaard and the dialectical tension of painting".