B.C. EPKER press

Peep
by Jos ten Berge

‘"Die Kunst auf eine angenehme Art zu befremden, einen Gegenstand fremd zu machen und doch bekannt und anziehend, das ist die romantische Poetik"*, is a quote of Novalis from around 1800. With this he tried to describe a programme which would not have been taken full advantage of until the twentieth century, by the Surrealists. The revolutionary touch of their efforts towards ‘convulsive beauty’ was, however, lost after their era when the ‘hidden persuaders’ of the consumer society perfected the same approach to such an extent that the borders between appearance and reality became gradually more diffuse and even freedom of thought seemed to fall prey to the spectacle.

In PEEP, four artists from the northern provinces of the Netherlands take up the cudgels against the appearances in the hall of mirrors, each in their own medium, all of them drawing freely on existing image idioms that they bend to their will both playfully and effectively.

The surrealistic dépaysagement, that feeling of disorientation as one suddenly finds oneself in a new and unheimliche environment, has been reinstated – now, though, not as making one capable of seeing a trivial world through poetic spectacles, but the reverse: to be able to take the spectacles off now and then and thus to observe what in the meantime has happened to that world, to penetrate a renewed Fall from grace, to separate guilt from innocence, to shatter the illusion of the sterile staging of modern happiness, to deconstruct the pretence and restore communication.

Four artists are standing in front of the shiny varnished wall of the new reality. Sometimes it is shot at with loud bangs, sometimes quietly gnawed at, but all the time there holes appear, spyholes, perforations, peepholes which provide a view of mental, private, public and hidden realities. They are entrances, ports of entry, at first sight as tempting as a femme fatale, on second thoughts just as humiliating.

The Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s had in mind a mental short circuit that had to be so intense that it would also show itself physically, in shuddering, shaking, dizziness and cramps, in which the wonderful poetic quality of existence would constantly be revealed. Things are different in the 21st century. Behind the shuddering is hidden – at best – the feeling of disaster that has already occurred or is approaching or – at worst – a gaping emptiness. Reliable, frameworks are lost, but the ecstatic cramps of the Surrealists have made way for a constant feeling of suspense, that does not even lead to release of tension because of a lack of a liberating dénouement. PEEP offers neither answer nor escape. PEEP offers holes: wide vistas of an uncertain future, confusing little insights into what may well be guilty interiors, disturbed backward glances to apparently glorious pasts, gnawing observations of keeping up appearances.

* The art of surprising in a pleasant manner, to alienate an object and yet preserve its familiar appeal. That is Romantic Poetics.

Translation by Berber Epker

B.C. Epker

Harma Heikens

Marten Winters

Wim Bosch