4
Jeroen Kooijmans Jeroen Kooijmans is a versatile artist whose works include videos, films, books, works of architecture and images in which the world and external reality are observed in those instances where the ordinary, everyday datum opens to potential connections with the world of dreams and poetry. His images evoke moments of contemplation, of detached, serene observation, typical of the European tradition of landscape painting. The archival materials gathered in the installation entitled Drawing houses were made by Kooijmans over the last decade, in collaboration with Roe Cerpac and the Dutch architecture group mvrdv. The installation looks like an artist’s studio, usually a place of reflection and invention. In Kooijmans’s Drawing houses it turns into an ambiguous space of negotiation between pictures devised and realized. The studio becomes a floating archive that balances between past and future and a display of possible realities. In the two projects Hanging houses, from 2005, and Floating Gardens, from 2001, the artist focuses on the study of a modular and adaptable residential form, based on essential lines and volumes, in direct dialogue with the principles of solid geometry and the simplest polyhedra like the cube, the parallelepiped and the pyramid. The formal solutions imagined by Kooijmans in small models and images respond to the need for additional spaces with respect to existing ones, and thus also hypothesize a utopian use of airspace, the sky, or more precisely the air itself. Simple component structures that suggest to the visitor who observes the models and drawings of a world in which it is possible to define one’s own spaces of living and dwelling, the places in which to position one’s own little house, with the same lightness and vivacity of children’s construction games.
On the following pages: Folding House, 2010
37