Let us build a game metaphor. First, an understanding of game: in a determined space and time, a social system in which to explore a distinctive perspective on the relationship between rules and constraints. Game metaphors are appealing because they extend an invitation to a deeper understanding of rule-governed systems. In the game metaphor that this exhibition could be, we are given a constellation of elements: stick figures, body parts, garlands, abstracted landscapes, geometric patterns. They all follow a set of rules; they interact in seemingly unintelligible ways, but there is a sense of cohesion, a feeling of affordance, which allows us to make sense out of them. It is a game of artistic perplexity of which we are bearing witness.
Nothing can be born in a vacuum. Even the most arbitrary things take place within a set of rules, whether we know them or not. Despite their usual negative connotation implying lack of freedom, rules are crucial for the creative process. In actuality, rules allow the artist to construct meaning, similar to a scaffold. It is precisely in following self-defined rules that the possibility of creative transformation is at reach.
Klaas Kloosterboer’s work, across painting, sculpture and video, is testimony to a practice that revisits itself to captain emotions. The point, however, is not to get stuck in them, in stagnant self-reflection. Art, accordingly, is the result of making decisions: what ought to be expressed, and how? What ought to be revealed, or conversely shrouded? What ought to be made, and how to make it? From inquisitiveness, to doubt, to decision: a set of actions that lead to the making of the artwork.
"Artworks seldom have the presence of normal objects, which don't ask any questions but are self-evident. For me -Kloosterboer says-, it's a goal to make an object with meaning, and above all with this unbelievable and strong presence that common objects around us have". The title of the show, Hands and Feet, taken from the Dutch saying Handen en voeten aan iets geven, is to give shape to an idea or plan, to carry it out. To put something meaningful with aplomb. Such is the endeavour.
