Fragmented Truth : Reinoud Oudshoorn & Alice Quaresma

20 Feb-4 Jul 2020

Overview

Fragmented Truth brings together the works of Alice Quaresma (b. 1985, Brazil) and Reinoud Oudshoorn (b. 1953, NL). Both originally trained as painters, they gradually moved away from that medium and approached alternative genres. Oudshoorn turned towards sculpture while Quaresma became more interested in photography and started to work with an extensive personal photo archive – mainly imagery of landscapes, architectural details and beach scenes. The origins of both artists are still perceptible, with Oudshoorn translating the characteristics of painting – amongst others the use of central perspective with the vanishing point at roughly 1.65 meters – into his sculptures, and Quaresma editing and expanding her photographs with painted geometric forms, drawing and collage. The inspirations from modernism, reductive and concrete art are another common factor. Oudshoorn’s sculptures of frosted glass and steel are mainly composed of geometric shapes inclined at various angles, citing movements of de Stijl and Bauhaus as well as their connection to architecture and nature. Effortlessly floating in space, his wall objects convey a three-dimensionality engaging with the spaces in between the interlacing surfaces. Similarly, Quaresma’s interventions of bright coloured dots, lines, rectangles and squares breathe life into the mainly black and white photographs, which function as stages where the cast of forms and shapes perform their actions. The geometric figures are reminiscent of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete Movement, which originated in the end of the 1960s and called for a greater sensuality, colour and poetic feeling in concrete art. The overlapping and switching between background and foreground liberates the images from their two-dimensionality and refers to the levels that lie in between – the invisible and the imaginary. Quaresma’s as well as Oudshoorn’s oeuvres are subtly looking for the interaction and participation of the viewer. They require a close-up inspection from all angles, a zooming in and out of spaces that open up while unravelling the mysteries behind the works: a connection between the structural and the natural, a discovery of the hidden, the blurred and its Fragmented Truth.