‘colours, symbols, systems’

Machiel van Soest (1968) has been extremely active for years within the Hague art scene. He was one of the driving forces behind vital artists’ initiatives like Luxus and Atelier als Supermedium. As is often the case with artists who also work as a stimulator and organiser, Van Soest’s own visual work threatened to drift to the background somewhat. But various facets of his artistic development process have nevertheless found their way to the public, making it immediately clear that this was a special artist one was dealing with. After being educated at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Van Soest continued his studies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1991-1993). He subsequently established Luxus in The Hague, together with among others the artists Channa Boon, Rob van Herwerden and Lisette Stuifzand. He had his first solo exhibition there in 1994. That same year, Van Soest was awarded the Royal Subsidy for Painting. Looking back, the mid-1990s were a time of flowering for young visual art in The Hague. In addition to Luxus, there were other interesting initiatives like Maldoror, Het Archief and Haags Centrum voor Actuele Kunst (HCAK). Van Soest exhibited at all three locations. The artists’ initiative Luxus (1994-2001) offers a high-paced succession of solo presentations by artists from the Netherlands and beyond. A new exhibition opens every two weeks. The venue is located in a former store building in a shopping street with a strong air of past glory, where sex shops and junk stores have since set up shop. The street connects the prosperous city centre with the ‘working class neighbourhood’ Schilderswijk. The exhibitions in Luxus also provide such stark contrasts: on some occasions the visitor is greeted by tidy rows of paintings, on others, installations that litter the floor with hundreds of empty beer cans or a scene resembling the aftermath of a wild party. There are also experiments with new media such as video and independently produced vinyl. Another perspective used by Van Soest to explore the ‘medium’ of exhibition, is his participation in a dozen double exhibitions at various locations in the Netherlands and abroad.

In the first half of 2004, Van Soest sets up an exhibition space in his own home, which he calls Kamer Laakkwartier and uses to present 24 one-day exhibitions of his own work. Two years later, this exhibition format is also used in Atelier als Supermedium (2006-2007), which he sets up with Ton Schuttelaar. Here too, the exhibitions only last one evening, although they can be preceded by weeks of preparations. The eight ‘exhibition rooms’ in a former gymnasium make it possible to organise presentations exploring exhibition principles like dialogue, sequence and symmetry. This fascinating ‘exhibition lab’ also contributes greatly to Van Soest’s personal artistic development, as an exhibition can be far more than simply putting a number of works on show. It can serve as a statement within which the substance, the presentation methods and the sequence of the works can contribute to a better interpretation. On a smaller scale, Van Soest pursues this line of exploration further in various exhibition series in his own home in The Hague (Kamer Laakkwartier, 2006-2007) and recently, since his stay in Belgrade at Soba Beograd (2008-), again in his own home. At the latter location, the artist succeeds in holding a different exhibition each day for a period of two weeks. As with the other projects, a report is published on the Internet (see: www.machielvansoest.nl ).

In his solo exhibition Skin (Luxus, 1995), Van Soest presents paintings that seem to be made of human skin. They are built up from numerous layers of paint in even more different colours. One could view them as ‘anti-paintings’, because, in part thanks to their slightly bulging shape, they deviate so distinctly from the norm. Thanks to their glossy finish and resulting cuddliness they seem more akin to an object than ordinary paintings do. They unify extremes like painting and sculpture, grisliness and beauty, individuality and collectivity. Over the years, Van Soest further expands his visual armamentarium. In the exhibition series organised by the artist from January to June 2004 in Kamer Laakkwartier, the development of a personal visual idiom becomes increasingly apparent. He explores the visual impact of materials that reflect, filter or drip. He works with objects, photographs, words, photocopies, light and sound. He withdraws from the canvas stretcher and fixes canvases directly on the wall.

In the period that follows, Van Soest continues his fundamental research into the grey area between painting and object, by filling plastic bags with a layer of sand or water, for instance, or by folding the Dutch flag in an unorthodox way and fixing it like that on the wall. In addition, the artist starts to use modified and unaltered ‘found objects’ as vessels for his message, consequently venturing into the field of sculpture and installation art, in which sound can also play a role. He uses video recordings to capture the world around him as well as his own performances. The works he exhibits also incorporate daily objects like earth, rope, flags, cleaning agents and bread. They seem to be symbols for elements of the world of the psyche and the political realm.

The Hague neighbourhood of Laakkwartier, where Van Soest has a small flat on the first floor, has more fellow citizens born in other countries than Dutch natives. The percentage of native-born residents is expected to drop from 41% in 2002 to slightly more than 20% in 2015. Van Soest personally experiences this process of change. The friction it leads to does not pass him by. The murder of Theo van Gogh on 2 November 2004 and the large-scale police raid eight days later in nearby Antheunisstraat– resulting in the arrest of two members of the Hofstad Network who plan to kill two members of parliament – leave traces in his art.

A system develops in the course of his work in which Van Soest attempts to bring together global phenomena. Although at first glance his works may appear objective, for the artist they symbolise the forces that he experiences at play in present-day social, religious and ideological tensions. But he is also looking for harmony. Red, yellow, blue and violet can merge into an ‘average’ skin tone. He makes dozens of designs of colour schemes. And series of photographs are also produced – of the Dutch landscape for instance.

For Van Soest, such exhaustive research focusing on that which is individual is a condition for arriving at one or several generalised images. Working on the basis of the typology this process creates, the artist can allow the multiform reality of the macro world to be reflected in the artificial microcosm of the work of art. Painting too continues to offer new possibilities. Van Soest makes a long series of paintings in which he applies many layers of paint – as he did in his skin paintings – but in an entirely different manner. Via an extremely labour-intensive process, the artist ‘stacks’ brushstrokes on top of one another, resulting in a forest of mini-stalagmites which due to the colour differences at the extremities reminds one of pointillism. He calls these paintings noise, as the series is the antithesis of his monochrome skins. He also demonstrates a similar polarity in his sound pieces, which vary from the dubbed piling of heterogeneous sounds to a ten-hour long continuous tone.

The developments within Van Soest’s work don’t go by unnoticed. He exhibits in among others Stroom Den Haag in 2004, 2005 en 2007. In the last year he participates in the group exhibition Lost Tongues Rediscovered, which is organised by the British curator Francis McKee. A painting with a clustering of ordinary, reversed and upside-down letters demonstrates among others the importance of language in his work. Van Soest also shows one of his ‘linked paintings’, which combine two rectangular canvases.

In the works on paper which he recently showed at Soba Beograd, the importance of words in his work becomes even more apparent, as is evidenced among others in his word images, for which he designed an elementary lexigraphy. He pushes forward with his exploration of noise by applying multicolour dots or marker lines to photo enlargements. He engages in further experimentation in the zone between plane and space in a new series of gauze paintings, in which a number of openings in a net are filled with paint. When the object is hung at some distance from a wall, it interacts with its own shadow. In addition, he does a lot of photography. By making frontal, carefully directed pictures of ‘found objects’, he allows relationships to develop between the emotionally and ideologically charged objects, similar to the colour schemes he made earlier on. But the main theme seems to be the expansion of his ‘visual dictionary’, which he has been working on for as long as ten years and which is intended to lead to an all-encompassing, comprehensive system. In this system, colours and forms – whether painted or in the form of an object – have to be linked to individual psychological experiences such as pain, pressure and temperature. These in turn have to be brought in connection with general and global phenomena like nationhood, virus or war. While this seems complicated, it has to result in clarity for Van Soest, or in any case in clear works of art.

Machiel van Soest is an artist who reinvents the visual arts by giving them a strictly individual meaning. He uses his work process to attempt to formulate his view of man and the world. Isn’t that typical of all true artists?

Gerrit Jan de Rook

Monochrome as background

Machiel van Soest’s studio is on the outskirts of the city, next to a funeral parlour, where smoke rises from the chimney. It is cold in his studio; winter has had an unexpected sting in the tail and he doesn’t have a stove. We get down to business straightway, profiting from the time our bodily warmth still give us some protection against the cold.

Machiel van Soest won the Dutch Royal Prize for Painting in 1995 on the basis of his works, Skins, at least ten of which are hanging in his studio. They are fairly small paintings that really only show one thing – human skin, but in many variations. Chubby or flat, with thick veins or still perfect. And with many shades of colour, from a faint yellowish tint to a blushing pink and red. As each individual yields a different portrait, so each of these ‘Little Skins’ has its own character. To put it plainly, the skin here is the illusion of skin. The material the paintings are made of is imitation or shammy leather. It is as if it is skin, but that doesn’t detract at all from the illusion. It looks raw and true to life, as though it was stretched for use. That’s where the idea started too, with the notion of human skin being used for lampshades by the Nazis in the war. Van Soest has turned this notion into art.

Machiel van Soest still makes Skins, but the range of his work has become wider. Paint and support continue to be what he is interested in, but now they have become the basis for extremely divergent works. Besides panels and canvas, imitation leather and shammy, he also uses various sorts of plastic and foil. And this leads to works that on one occasion look like a genuine painting and on another like an object or minimal installation. The relation with painting is obvious. Sometimes the artist simply mounts a piece of plastic that he leaves unpainted, with a cushion-like padding as backing, resulting in a bulging monochrome work, in black or white. Not so much as a scrap added and yet it looks like a painting.

The horizontal works occupy a special place. They are rectangular and lie like a row of tombstones side by side on the ground.

A human-size piece of plastic with a zip fastener. A piece of transparent foil with grubby paint on it. A Dutch flag with earth on it. Or a low white coffin. They form part of a series that revolves round the theme of soil and graves and is presented in ever-changing combinations. They are sober works with a taut sense of form. They could be classified as minimal art if only the eye was arbiter. But a flag with earth on it is of course not only form, but also a highly emotional image.

The work of Machiel van Soest looks taut and formal, yet this artist is not primarily concerned with an enquiry into forms. Events around him – at home, in the city or in the news – are his starting point. In terms of content he is interested in ‘a certain aspect of life’ and this aspect is not the most cheerful. Emotionally charged subjects such as death, destruction and identity recur constantly. This is what catches his eye, he says, as though he would rather see things differently. The artist speaks about the

subject of his work in veiled terms. Almost reluctantly. And as for his art, you could also call it one of veiled terms. As though he would rather not show what he shows.

The artist is good at hiding things. Take for example his photos covered with white paper so that you only see the contours of a scene. One’s eye has to start looking and then it seems as though part of a façade looms up out of the white or a torso. One’s fantasy of what an image shown with such circumspection might mean is stimulated as a result. This ‘guarded’ approach is combined, or sometimes even coincides, with an extremely direct expression. A Skin is abstract if you see it as a monochrome pink object. But as soon as one really sees the image as skin, it has an immediacy that has nothing to do with abstraction. At this juncture the work also falls outside the tradition of monochrome painting.

Of course skin is also the ‘outside’ of a person, and in this sense it is a covering. It is the surface where a person can be touched, where one is tangible for others, and where intimacy also occurs. As mentioned above, the Skin paintings are composed of many shades of colour, and their appearance is also very varied. Some are eerie and pale, while others aren’t that at all, but are glowing rather, or else they have the intimacy of skin that is close to one, and desirable. They ask to be touched.

For Machiel van Soest his work really began when he decided not to paint figurative work any more. He distanced himself from painting as depiction and thus also from the possibility of going for a direct confrontation with a shocking image. Instead he

developed a visual idiom that is both expressive and reserved. Both rough and refined. The content of his work is easily guessed, but cannot be literally spelled out. In terms of narrative it is not explicit.

Machiel van Soest won’t paint a dead body. But he does show the proximity of death in many variations and installations. A spot on the ground that is marked off for it, a coffin in which a body would fit, a plastic sack that could serve as a body bag, a room that smells of gas. Some of his Skins moreover too are such that they can only depict dead flesh – they are drained of all colour and are deathly white. In terms of content the result is an body of work that is macabre and dreary, and yet at the same time

marvellously beautiful and masterly.

The work oscillates in the field of tension between what is presentable and what not. The minimalism that he practises would seem to offer an acceptable, that is, presentable, form in order to reach the core of his subject matter and render it physical. The work also touches on questions that play a role in journalism, in the reporting of terrorist attack or natural disasters. In newspapers photos of victims are sometimes touched up, or even not placed, because the images are too upsetting, too bloody. They are

regarded as not suitable for people to view. At the origins of the work of Machiel van Soest there are also images that are not fit to be seen. But the artist deals with them in a different way than the media. In his work there is much more that is not shown. The artist renounces many forms of narrative and depiction, proposing tangibility in its stead – a physical relation with the subject matter that interests him. It is another way of allowing the reality of emotional images to have their impact. The work reinforces the horror with the visual power of the material.

Before I leave the studio Machiel van Soest shows me his bathroom – a tiled room that he uses as a sort of laboratory to test out various types of work to bring them to exhibition level. On the wall is a photo of the concentration camp of Dachau, showing a birds’ eye view of a row of barracks. Underneath is a photo of the housing estate of Ypenburg, near The Hague, also shot from the air. When you view the ground plan from the air, the resemblance is striking. Form and content clash here. Obviously a housing estate isn’t a concentration camp. And yet, a housing estate is the spitting image of a concentration camp. And so an ‘Ypenburg Camp’ rises before the viewer’s eyes, a place where people imprison themselves voluntarily.

The meanings gradually splay out as one walks round the work of Machiel van Soest. The work seems to explain itself, the more you see of it. Ground must have something to do with grave. Façade with house. House and flag with identity. Identity with vulnerability and transience.

The bath cubicle looks something like an operation theatre. A sterile environment in which images are placed under the knife. In which what is rotten is cut out, in order to view and touch it and show it in a new shape. Art thus becomes a sort of exorcism. On the wall is a small dark red painting. It looks like newly spilt blood – an effect that is added to by splashes on the wall and floor. As if the bloody deed is still fresh. As if.

Jurriaan Benschop

The starting point in the work of Machiel van Soest is the series Skin, skin coloured monochromes that represent human skin, almost are skin. The intimate, layered and detailed surface attracts as well as repels, because when looking closer one sees that the skin is marked by apparent violence and is stretched like a piece of leather. Because of this disturbing find the onlooker is left in uncertainty. Van Soest examines the moments of contemporary living where everyday life is driven out by a penetrating idea of raw reality. The ultimate personal experience in relation to the state, history, media and body. A shower stresses the intimate home and evokes associations of sterile operating-rooms. In his work we find a movement from the individual to the nation, from large to small. From individual experience to the anonymous mass and back. This theme is shown in the material, colour and structure of the work. (RvS)

The unveiling of an experience that initially occurs under the skin and revealing what is literally happening inside us, physical but also emotional processes, is the central theme in Van Soest´s work.

Corresponding to the character of human skin in its many variations, from chubby to flat, with thick veins or still perfect, and with many shades of color, from a faint yellowish tint to a blushing pink and red, the Skin paintings embody the intersection between the “inside” and the “outside” world.

The reality of the outside world that we sense on our skin, like pressure, temperature or in form of pain, as well as the reality of our inside world, our intimate emotions, but also sickness and death are absorbed in the color of skin.

The same experience is presented in the new book ‘Reflection on Skin’. In this novel no sentences are composed. Instead, words are listed in a certain sequence and meant to be read or rather seen as images representing spaces, physical as well as thinking and emotional spaces, a surrounding décor of all times, everything, all situations and all lives.

Using the metaphor of the world reflecting on our skin, skin as border, there were existence can be felt, the book is a travel through time and reality that starts with lists of smallest known matter to human tissue and then after leaving the body, our surroundings, daily life, bigger and bigger, earth, thinkingsystems, to the cosmos and then bounced back with the speed of light as light entering the skin, inevitably ending in human emotions and inner life.

Ivana Jovanovic van Soest