page number:
67 / 104
file:
Kjell Rylander Archives
document:
Questioning Everyday Things
author:
Gabi Dewald
dd-mm-yyyy:
25-02-2012
combination of applied art and readymade takes great delight in exaggerating the trivial until it becomes absurd, of overstating bourgeois banality until it becomes comical, of stretching the common until it becomes dangerous, and of making gravitas become witty. Yet this kind of re-labelling is not what Rylander is all about. It seems that this humorous, even sarcastic and occasionally vain detour is not productive enough for him, that it lacks interest because it fails to lead to his objective. Rylander’s position among those who work with the unassuming nature and plainness of the everyday object reminds me of the porcelain installations of Edmund de Waal. To my mind, both are linked by their innate reserve and casualness, by the gentle, poetic way they question objects, spaces and relationships. Both manage to achieve a type of lyrical result – although the one makes his vessels from scratch, while the other uses found items which he fragments and reassembles in new constellations. Yet the self-restraint of the artist as an author is comparable: their work is based on first principles, on existing objects/shapes which are carefully complemented. Here, we find a plain cylindrical form, and there everyday tableware. Questions are the guiding light, not assertive statements. And whereas one of them asks questions of the architecture of inner space, of identity within a spatial context, the other is interested in the architecture of everyday life, of finding oneself amongst a corpus of habit. Yet when all is said and done, the work of both of them is full of musicality and rhythm. With his calm interventions, de Waal orchestrates space, sets optical counterpoints with his ceramic implementations and thus re-interprets existing designs. Rylander composes light, lyrical paraphrases and variations that caress and question a common theme in ever new ways. His constellations are possessed of a high rhythmic tension. With Rylander, formal arrangement is always accompanied by certain artistic interventions in form. He is never concerned with addition, with the mass per se, with the sculptural quality: we no longer find developments created next to, on top of, or with each other, as used to be the case. Where social structures are concerned, there is currently little that is guaranteed; there is only conjecture. Much seems to be in a state of upheaval. Domestic tableware from days gone by is synonymous with outmoded everyday organisational systems which apparently no longer have any value. The repetition of the form of the plate, the rim of the cup, the detached handled is co-terminus with the repetition of the question of how these elements will be handled and used in the future, and of what their significance will be. Here, too, Rylander’s interventions are always unspectacular, verging more on the casual, never an end in themselves, and hence all the more entangled. Many of his “still life” works look as if they have been taken straight