Notes
"The disintegrating quality is so delicate and beautiful." Stirling Davenport.
"This is a fascinating piece.
The artistry of the photography is as remarkable as the sculpture.
I most like the contrast and use of negative space that fuses
in transition from nothingness to substance in a story of both emergence and decay." David Gilbaugh.
"this is giving me that feeling, that sense of truth that I feel about aging and death." Liz Rice-Sosne.
"Very like a distressed Brancusi; I'm very fond of it." Andrea Grenadier.
photo: Brenda Clews
Of the sculptures as a whole:
"I like their brindled, sometimes broken surfaces."
Konrad, Germany
"Theo Willemse's work is as it is. He does not promote theories of his art. Theories are up to the viewer, owner, curator, critic. You may find what inspires you in his sculptures.
While Theo is fairly opague on what he is exploring in his art, believing how the pieces speak to you is enough, that the artist creates and then lets go, having watched his oeuvre develop since 1983, I find I have some perceptions to convey.
His work embodies an intricate interplay of internal dynamics. He will tell you, "It's about the shape, and where the texture of the file shows." Or, "Where it disintegrates slightly, that burn, a moment of dissolution, that's it." "Framing -the stands, pillars, or bases- is important, how the piece is presented visually." His sculptures ask us to touch their forms in three dimensions with our eyes.
You feel your way into his sculptures at a primal level: their curves, gaps, lines, textures, materials. In them you can sense the elements, water, fire, earth. The world of rocks, rivers, trees, plants, flowers wind in them. The wings of birds appear. The world of women and feminine form is here. Phallic shape and wombs underlie some of his works, the natural landscapes of the body wrought in abstracted form in stone, metal, plaster. Some are simple geometric shape, yet always with moments in their rhythms where ruptures occur - an unfinished edge, a sudden buckling of a smooth line, a natural crevice like a knot - in these places we can see where the working is raw.
His sculptures speak in smooth lines, gentle curves, certainties, buckles, pitfalls, moments of indecision, of an intertextuality that echoes our internal life within the sculptural forms of our bodies and our surroundings. Like a continuous spiral from the inner to the outer, we find an aesthetic whose tension consists of the struggle of form, its evolving shapes, and the joy of creating."
Toronto, 2010