Looking Up
2021
ca. 600x400x400 cm
diverse materials


Looking up
I look up rather frequently: Always a nice surprise to see the blue sky there, or anyway, sky. Looking up is a gesture of displacement. I displace myself from live on the ground, in order to may be comfort the occasionally felt displacement. Looking up is looking for meaning. I saw the embodiment of this gesture in a painting of El Greco in the cathedral of Toledo in 1998: The disrobing of Christ, 1577-79, enduring the unspeakable. Looking up, leaving this place in exchange it for a more spacious reality: the sky. I was struck by this almost dissolving gaze of watery eyes, soaked in drama, after I walked underneath the swaying white cloth that protects the streets of Toledo from the merciless heat. An artificial white sky, canvases of paintings to be, stretched between the roof eaves. The white replaces the blue, a canvas as a cloud. Realities interweave in the manmade.
In April 2020 I stand on my balcony and look up into the clear blue sky and sigh: no contrails whatsoever; for days. It is this absence that materializes how we are catapulted into this impalpable reality.
Three weeks ago I spotted a fabric at Schroeder in Rotterdam: a very thin cotton, cerulean blue. The warp is white, the weft blue: the coloristic precondition for a spacious feeling where blue and white are equal partners in the experience of air. The most familiar comes down as a concept. The blue cloud, the blue contrail, an idea, manmade and as grand as disruptive, even in it’s absence. I saw the absent stipe in this material. Ripping it apart and weaving it together in a cross, a reconstructed sky, summing up a trail of memories that group around these questions of endurance and comfort in a material sigh.