Stories
Stories
Anet van de Elzen (1963, Eerde) is a specialist in conveying expression. She uses her hands for this. These tell us stories, countless stories, varied and exciting, moving, melancholic, sometimes comforting, sometimes rebellious. Each story is held by clay or wax, sometimes stone, sometimes bronze. Sometimes she turns to photography and her hands speak to her own body.
In the middle of the new district, De Oijense Zij, on the north side of the city of Oss, she has placed a spacious, monumental work of art - she has translated a street into a horizontal drawing, consisting of colorful vowels that together form letters in a sentence. She lets a cow graze, a little boy looks into the sky through binoculars and a stork rests on a lamppost. One poetic ode to the love for art, but also an ode to the expression which she brings outside to breath. After all, she was looking for an appealing counterpart to the architecture and design of the district of Ashok Bhalotra, architect and urban planner. She found the origin of her counterpart in wax. Clay and wax are primary without explicit meaning. However, the potential of possibilities that these materials offer her for making art fascinates her. It is about a continuous formation of creating images. Preferably as sketches, firm and energetic, in direct strokes without the temptation of perfection and consummation. The artist aims for the viewer's confrontation with the moment of creation. This must be palpable in the final work of art, as a minute of the creation process.
Opposite the clay and wax is stone and bronze. Both are time consuming and very labor intensive. The lightness and the move in the moment that come from the hands testify to her decisive fingers, targeted touches of the hand, decisive actions with the putty knife. Everything during the process revolves around a battle with the stiff, resistant material. The cow she makes is not actually a cow's cow, but an intimate celebration of the moment of happiness about the shape that is taking shape. No definitive image has been determined here, although bronze has traditionally belonged, from the first rider-on-horse monument, to the visual culture established in the art-historical development of Christian art.
All things of beauty cancel themselves out, the artist seems to say: It is never about a single form, there are no dogmas, no egos. It is special that Van de Elzen took a cow as the subject for this vision: something so absolutely 'nothingly'; its stature does not make it an alert animal, at the same time its gaze must be alert, after all, the cow is originally a prey animal, so vigilance is evident.
When you meet the artist, her own eyes stand out. Paradise, that's what they sound like. They express life force and are her lenses on higher human values, without morals, but a naked poetic consciousness. And so she added a child to the cow, sitting on the edge of the roof with binoculars in hand. The child peers into the distance, as far as the viewing time is long. And there is contact; there is a stork sitting on a lamppost, a metaphor for the reference of the announcement of the birth of a work of art, or the birth of a blissful moment of realization of the artist who notices herself and sees herself translated into the work. It is the hope and wish that the viewer - the resident, the walker on the street - discovers the work of art in parts, or as a whole, as a source within himself. Like a story. The vowels express Paul van Ostaijen's desire for ambition and amazement about reality. And the district of Bhalotra works no differently. But who knows, which resident is aware of the direction of the urban planner.
Van de Elzen is and conveys it in a warm way: through her expression. And she is a specialist in that, a real artist.
Edwin Jacobs
2002, then Director of Museum Jan Cunen, Oss
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