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Dürst Britt and Mayhew Gallery . The Hague, Netherlands

Installation view
Wet Scene Study No. IV. 2015
Water on ceramic tiles. 300 x 120 cm
Wet Scene Study No. IV. 2015
Water on ceramic tiles. 300 x 120 cm
Installation view
Wet Scene Study No. V [Seperated Lovers]. 2015
Water on concrete. Approximately 580 x 145 cm

– Like with your wet scenes.
– Yeah. It has a specific kind of materiality. I really like this moment when you spill a liquid and it’s a meaningless form. So, I thought about stylizing these meaningless shapes into letters, to make a moment central in the work when matter turns into meaning.
– Of course, it began with a shapeless, meaningless form to meaningful traces, which would be a letter.
– Yes. I was quite interested in this borderline. When something issues form, matter or meaning. That’s how I started writing in water.
– I always thought you were a kind of alchemist.
– You know, my texts evaporate during the day.
– Someone has always to feed it, right?
– Yes. It’s always susceptible to the context. The state of the text is determined by where it is, by whom takes care of it, and the attention it gets, also.
– Where do you find them?
– What?
– Your texts.
– It comes from encounters that happen when I move through the world of information. An article, or a book, in philosophy, or sociology, or anthropology. Any discipline or subjectthat resonates with what I’m thinking about at that moment.
– What are you thinking about at the moment?
– About two lovers only connected by telephone.

Excerpt from Inked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper by Tiago de Abreu Pinto

Wet Scene Study No. V [Seperated Lovers], detail.
Installation view
Still Life with Encyclopedia Americana
C-print on wood, wax and paper on glass. 50 x 40 cm
Parrot
C-print on wood, wax and paper on glass. 50 x 35 cm
Tradition [man with hat and jewels]
C-print on wood, wax and paper on glass. 50 x 35 cm

Lahuis uses photographic reproductions, but makes the image misty by covering the glass plate of the frame with paper and wax. The shrouding of the image disconcerts the viewer; is the image painted or is it a photo? Lahuis plays with the materiality of visual information. Obscuring the composition causes it to almost dissolve into an immaterial blur. By vealing them he underscores the interchangeability of images in our present-day 'information age'.

— Royal award for contemporary painting, Amsterdam

Installation view
Tradition [Group Portrait]
C-print on wood, wax and paper on glass. 120 x 75 cm

... a number of works showed different kinds of ‘stand-in’ imagery from picture frames, glooming behind a thick layer of beeswax on paper. The depictions were conceptually related to the idea of representation; an image of a parrot that functioned as a colour test, an image showing the metric size of a passe-partout, generalised skylines or famous people from another era, etc. But above all the images were subtly shimmering out there in the distance, from behind the wax. 

...

The volatile and temporary character of the work make it seem like it wants to constantly escape our reality. Even though the wax is hard and solid and even though the burned images are stabilised, it still feels like the work constantly wants to evade time, as if all it wants to do is amalgamate back into nothing as soon as possible. One might even argue it wants to remove itself from the artist.

Eelco van der Lingen A fleeting everlasting monument for a moment that has yet to become history-defining.

Installation view
Room II Rooms No. II
Transparent foil in custom frame. 250 x 125 cm
Fluid Skin.
C-print on wood, wax and paper on glass. 70 x 50 cm

‘One day I was in a quiet bar. It was quite late and I was observing the bartender; she was washing the last empty glasses and she would take her wet hands from the sink to dry them with the towel thrown over her shoulder. In my mind she thought the towel was soaking wet, but then she realised it was her hands that were leaking. They simply wouldn’t dry; they would stay wet, eternally dripping’.


A personal recollection that became Wet Scene Study No. VI [Dripping hands]

Installation view
Facade III
C-print on wood, wax and paper on glass. 60 x 45 cm
Wet Scene Study No. VI [Dripping Hands]
Water on Concrete. 220 x 790 cm