21_HANS OVERVLIET+COLLAGES FOR OLGA&OLEG

Hans Overvliet | collages

This document I made on the request of Olga&Oleg.

To start with Olga’s question I try to say something meaningful about the starting points of my work: by means of a deconstruction of images from the omnipotent flow of images that disciplines us every day as a 'consumer' and controls us as a 'producer', in order to arrive at a new construct that provides a commentary on this time and this space, in order to acquire a place in art history itself, or at least attempt to be included in our collective image memory.

The method: I construct paper collages out of existing material, taken from the mass media: newspapers, magazines, advertising brochures, official letters from authorities, postcards, maps, catalogs, etc. I cut my chosen images into small strips and subsequently glue them back into geometrical perfect patrons into new combinations.

During the first five years of this body of work the subjects of the deconstruction were chosen from categories as ‘militarism, violence, war, etc.’ confronted / mixed with ‘archetypal elements from the aesthetics of fashion, architectture, commercials, etc.’ and ‘all forms of the arts: dance, film, paintings, etc.’

The work always has at least two qualities: from afar it appears as an abstract image that, when approached, reveals its pictoriality.

Since the postcard-sized collages can all be seen on my website, I leave them out in this summary. For the record: there are about 100.

Comment from the press: Rolf Bosboom in the local Provincial Zeeuwse Courant – November 4 2005 in an article about this oeuvre: 'The paper collages force the spectator to look intensively. The collections of cut and reconstructed images result in an new image of very high density.

Sometimes you experience recognition - a date taken from a newspaper, a plan and / or information material of exhibittions and museums visited by the artist - but the images themselves are cut up in such a way that any ‘explanation’ is always at great distance. (…)

Overvliet with an utmost precision fragmentizes reality.

Looking from a distance, the rhythm of the lines and colours predominate. This rhythm constantly changes in relation to the position of the spectator. The more the viewer distances him or herself from the image, the more form goes over content. The careful way the oeuvre is [re]constructed is a sign of his great devotion.’

Since quite some time passed since I made the last work, this document has the character of an intuitive look back in the mirror, both In pictures as in texts.

Middelburg March 29 2021 | Hans Overvliet

Click here for the collages ‘dreams & false alarms’ #1 | 2020 Click here for the collages ‘dreams & false alarms’ #2 | 2002 Click here for an the summary | 2002 – 2015

photo © W.F.T. van Houtum 2020

HANS OVERVLIET LANGE NOORDSTRAAT 67 | 4331 CC MIDDELBURG (+) 31 06 282 770 52 | E CURIOSITAS@ZEELANDNET.NL WWW.HANSOVERVLIET.COM

Substantively anecdotal 1 A woman from Bosnia with three rather faded carnations in her right hand stares at her devastated land. Her headscarf blurry rhymes with the contours of the only landscape she knows. The Dutch painter Armando could easily paint another hundred years of Waldränder here.

The war correspondents have long been covering new conflicts - the constant remains that it burns a lot further away than here. Her husband remains dead.

I see myself in a different picture, years ago, in a different devastated environment; a city, far away from here, very close to the present.

Substantively anecdotal 2 Again a woman, again with red flowers, tulips this time. Yerevan, Armenia, April 24, 2005. It commemorates the extermination of its Armenian people around 1915 by the Turks, with the exuberant cooperation of the Turkish Kurds.

In September 1982 I was there too. The image there joined my memory film of all those monuments that have been promising me all my life: never again.

The Armenians for whom the red tulips are intended have actually been murdered twice: the first time when they were horribly robbed of their lives, the second time through denial.

Substantively anecdotal 3 The first time I was in Moscow in 1983 on my way to Yemen.

I was stuck there for a week because Aeroflot does not connect to Sana'a; we got re-arranged.

A Russian journalist I met earlier in Gaza City invited me to a meeting of a collective of "free" journalists. Anna Politkovskaya was part of this collective. The meeting took place somewhere in a cafe far outside the centre. That day she was unable to attend; I never met her in person.

The collage tries to connect my art-resiency in Rotterdam with her & her funeral which I could not attend. So I missed her for the last time . . .

Substantively anecdotal 5 | very personal My dear friend Ingrid Haan died in 2008 at 63 years of age.

Days after her death, her body was found on her bed: the doctor diagnosed cardiac arrest. She had been back from Turkey a few days where she was completing the final formalities to move there, when she passed away.

We had tough confrontations about the qualitative or nonqualitative additions of artists to the art climate in this world.

Ingrid had every right to her harsh judgments: for many years she scoured every graduation exhibition in order to bring in her eyes good young artists to Middelburg. It resulted in really great exhibitions and ditto (art) discourse.

M. & cross #2 | Middelburg Saturday, March 17, 2018 In the studio complex in Vlissingen in the Netherlands, where my studio is situated, an artwork of mine is located on an inter-mediate platform of the stairwell. From ground level, five steps lie between you and that work. It measures 144 x 244 centimeters.

The artwork is an enlargement of a paper collage, printed on perspex; different images are cut out horizontally and pasted back and thus interlock into a story with each other.

Indeed it is the Iimage on the right.

A group of twelve year old children of a primary school is visiting the complex in the context of an art education project.

A headscarfed girl sees the artwork and freezes in her movement. And she looks. After some time she takes the five steps up. Now she is standing still on the intermediate platform.

And looks. Then she slowly walks forward. Somewhere in the jumble of images she has discovered the headscarfed girl. That girl stands with her arms wide spread amidst the rubble of a street somewhere in Syria. The iconic picture of a prisoner in the Abu Ghraib Prison is imminent.

Our girl now touches the image almost with her nose; the art-work towering above her. Then she moves very, very slowly her hands together until her fingertips touch each other as if she was holding a sphere. Then her hands include the girl's head in the collage.

She is standing there, her hands around the head of the other head-scarfed girl. Eye in eye.

collages | ad random selection from different series | different sizes

Hans Overvliet | collages