【新聞特報】【La Biennale di Venezia 2013】KARLYN DE JONGH

The work of Karlyn De Jongh (1980, Netherlands) is about "time passing", in particular about time passing in life. Her work is an ongoing program that she started on 1 December 2011: visualising the progression of the days that manifest her life and with that, demonstrating that time is passing. De Jongh visualises her emotional relationship to these lived days through colour. This year, a selection of 11 of her paintings are shown as part of the 55^th Venice Biennale: 11 days that she spent in Venice while painting her works for the the exhibition PERSONAL STRUCTURES at Palazzo Bembo, Venice. The following text is her artist statement:

On 1 December 2011, I started an ongoing program: to document my life as time is passing. It is a process of recording the progression of the days that manifest my life: in doing so, I manifest time and also show ‘me’ at different moments in time—I exist here and now.

My ‘days’ are represented through painted colour on a surface. With colour, I visualise my emotional relationship to the days lived. My paintings look quite simple. With simple brushstrokes and single colours, they are visually not very spectacular. They are direct and unpretentious, saying: at that moment, this is who I am.

My works are placed one next to the other in the linear sequence of lived days. In this way, they manifest the passing of time. It shows the passing of ‘physical’ time. I cannot see the ‘passing of time’ separately from the passing of my life-time: in my life, ‘I’ am always there. Understanding time additionally as my ‘personal’ time, allows me to step away from the physical, public or objective length of events—by looking at the clock and counting the hours. My works are not all the same in width. The width of the work and thereby the amount or strength of the painted colour, shows my experience of the event, the day. My day starts and ends according to my rhythm.

I see my existence, ‘me’, as the accumulation of lived experiences, of experienced moments in time within an uncertain time-span.

‘I express myself’ means: I visualise my consciously lived experiences in the most sincere way I can, and am—at least at that moment—very much aware about ‘me’.

The way I experience is strongly influenced by my physical state as well as the culture I grew up in. ‘Where I am from’ has a great impact: visually, I am closer to Mondrian or even the Dutch tulip fields, than to for example Giorgio De Chirico. In addition, I think that also the accumulation of experiences and my consciousness about who I am at this moment and who I want to be has a great effect on how I experience ‘today’.

Physical time flows linearly in the direction of the future. My work shows the accumulation of days of my life, my lived days. My oeuvre is becoming larger, my ‘past’, the list of facts about my life is becoming longer. Seeing the passing of time from my personal perspective, the flow of time might just as well be a countdown to the undefined moment of my death, having less and less personal ‘future’. In my daily life, I am mainly focussed on the future, thinking about the passing of time in the sense of a countdown still scares me too much. Because: when I die, my life will be over.

A day has a present, a past and a future. In my paintings, past, present and future are all ‘present’. Maybe because I am still relatively at the beginning of my consciously experienced life (at least, I hope so), for me the future is very important—this might change as I get older. The past has past. However, for my work the past is still influential when it says something about the future.

To me, a moment is not durationless. It is possible that I do not experience the duration that intensely, but still the moment has an end. Like my life, like my personal time, there is an end—death. Physical time will continue passing, regardless the various experiences of it.

My colours show the passing of psychological time. For me, this psychological time has not so much to do with the speed of time. To me, speed is not “of the essence” (as Lawrence Weiner stated). Yes, I experience time moving faster or slower depending on how I am ‘enjoying’ the moment, but for me, the actual ‘joy’ is reflected in the colour, because this is how I experience the physical time the way I do.

The experienced relation between the days is an important factor: I choose the colour of a particular day by comparing it to the other days that I experienced in the past. At the moment, my life is very beautiful and therefore I choose beautiful colours, but there is a difference: some days are more special than others and require a brighter colour or a bigger surface to visualize it. Days that might at another point in my life would be considered fantastic, might now in relation to the recently lived days be not so special—or the other way around.

My awareness of ‘being here-and-now’ is strongest when both physical and personal time are consciously experienced in the same moment. Then I experience myself within past and future, seeing where I come from and where I am going and how I am at the moment. In my work I always paint the ‘now’. When painting a day that has already past, I am painting the relation I now have with this past day.

The content of ‘now’ changes over time. The flow of physical time is real and objective. Apart from all my personal experiences and thoughts, I see my body ageing. Besides that, ‘facts’ come into existence: events that only existed as possibilities in the future, become present and then turn into ‘past’. Only through memories (personal views) and the presence of artworks (present facts), do these past events exist. In the end, my artworks are all that is left over.

I have taken the day (and not a month or a year) as the time-frame to express myself, because for me it is ‘manageable’: it is an oversee-able period, which forces me to stay focussed and to take a standstill everyday to realise who I am, where I am and where I am going. A day passes by very quickly and so, there is no time for excuses: if I am unhappy with something, NOW is the moment I can do something about it. NOW is the moment for change. Life passes too quickly.

Of course, the fact that I, Karlyn De Jongh, exist here and now is probably only interesting for a very selected group of people around me. But I hope that—apart from this personal visualisation of time—the fact that I manifest the passing of time in general, will stimulate others to think more consciously about their own life-time.

KARLYN DE JONGH - 03 MAY 2013 VENICE:

Karlyn De Jongh, 3 MAY 2013 - VENICE. Oil paint on paper, 48x48cm. Photo: Global Art Affairs Foundation

KARLYN DE JONGH - 16-18 DECEMBER 2012 - KUWAIT:

Karlyn De Jongh, 16, 17, 18 DECEMBER 2012 – KUWAIT. Oil paint on wood, 50x17cm, 50x34cm, 50x20cm. Photo: Global Art Affairs Foundation

KARLYN DE JONGH - 18-24 DECEMBER 2012 - DOHA QATAR AND HONG KONG:

Karlyn De Jongh, 18 & 19 DECEMBER 2012 – DOHA QATAR, 2012. Oil paint on wood, 50x25cm, 50x35cm. AND: Karlyn De Jongh, 20, 21, 22, 23 & 24 DECEMBER 2012 – HONG KONG”, 2012. Oil paint on wood,  50x10cm, 50x10cm, 50x10cm, 50x25cm, 50x25cm. Photo: Global Art Affairs Foundation

KARLYN DE JONGH - 4-5 MAY 2013 and 8-16 MAY 2013 – VENICE:

Karlyn De Jongh, 4, 5 MAY 2013 and 8-16 MAY 2013 – VENICE. Oil paint on wood, each work 210cm high, various widths. Installation view at Palazzo Bembo, Venice Biennale 2013. Photo: Global Art Affairs Foundation

KARLYN DE JONGH - 25 NOVEMBER 2012 VENICE:

Karlyn De Jongh, 25 NOVEMBER 2012  - VENICE. Oil paint on wood, 80x36cm. Photo: Global Art Affairs Foundation

KARLYN DE JONGH - DECEMBER 2012 JANUARY 2013 - VENICE:

Karlyn De Jongh, 8 + 9 DECEMBER 2012, 22 + 23 JANUARY 2013, VENICE. Oil on wood. 180 x 15, 180 x 80, 180 x 30, 180 x 15 cm. Photo: Global Art Affairs Foundation

KARLYN DE JONGH - FEBRUARY MARCH 2013 VENICE:

Karlyn De Jongh, 21-23 FEBRUARY 2012, 18-19, 21-24 and 30 MARCH 2013 – VENICE. Oil paint on wood, all works 73 cm high, various widths. Photo: Global Art Affairs Foundation

KARLYN DE JONGH http://www.karlyndejongh.org/index.php?page=1&lang=en