The sun comes in

In the Palm of a Hand

In seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the passage of time was often captured in the expression of the sky or in the attrition of an individual, as well as in the renowned still lifes– fruit at its ripest or already on the path towards decomposition, flowers in full splendour or with drooping petals–, a sense of impermanence pervading every face and landscape and domestic scene. My own relationship with Dutch art extends back to my childhood, which was very happily spent in Holland. In those years I remember feeling a strong continuum between the paintings I saw in the Rijksmuseum and Mauritshuis and the pulsating universe beyond. On Sundays my family would visit the beach of Scheveningen, and I would gaze out at the sea and remember the paintings of storm-tossed ships as well as quieter ones of sand dunes, once again as a passive observer of scenes that stirred up feelings I was not yet able to describe.

In the work of Dutch artist Marijke van Warmerdam, time remains a fugitive subject, one she approaches with a beguiling lightness, gravitas and originality. Whether it’s the hands of the clock or the hands of a human being, we see time held or displayed for an instant before slipping away. A man holds a bouquet of colourful watches: we see the hands of the watch jump from the face of one watch to another like a renegade trickster, always on the run. This exhibition questions the very nature of our measurements, and Van Warmerdam’s defamiliarising of some of the instruments we use to measure our world leads to a more existential questioning.

A photograph titled There is the sun shows Van Warmerdam as a young girl pointing towards the sun, her arm raised like a sundial, announcing a preoccupation that would soon acquire artistic expression throughout her life. Again and again, we will see the sun as co-author of visual effects. Dozens of oranges spread out over the ground signal the end of the day with the oblong shadows they cast, yet they also resemble planets from a dismantled orrery, this round fruit from a bowl evoking something more cosmic.

The oranges are echoed in the video of orange balls tossed about on turbulent water, submerged and then resurfacing, at the mercy of a river’s frothy thunder. The balls are joined by a suitcase, equally adrift and abandoned to the currents. In another video, a tree trunk rolls over and over at the place of convergence between two bodies of water, like an idée fixe or a fluvial myth stuck at a certain moment in the narrative. These torrents were filmed at the Tiber in Rome, near a dam. (As a child I remember my amazement at learning that dams are essential to the very existence of Holland). But we could be anywhere; all cultural heritage is stripped away, everything left to the laws of physics.

When I was eight our family returned to Mexico, and the other major landscape of my life was defined by the sun, and by the volcanic. From my home in Mexico City we could see two volcanoes in the distance. In a pair of striking photographs, Van Warmerdam shows two halves of a lava stone held in the hands of a child, and then in the hands of a man, whose calloused hands offer them through a car window, each its own kind of offering: one of wonder, the other possibly of commercial value. This small fragment from a volcanic landscape has been split open to reveal its glistening raspberry-coloured interior that calls to mind crushed fruit ice or a precious gemstone. It too embodies the passage of time, a geological time much vaster than the humble measurements we keep. This lava stone, which once formed part of a molten flow, contains the memory of a past eruption.

In Van Warmerdam’s lyrical work, landscapes big and small are burst open or else contained, always in a state of becoming. Yet nothing ever takes place entirely on its own, and an instant finds its afterlife through the influence it has on entities nearby. Indeed, an almost Swedenborgian sense of interconnectedness  invigorates this exhibition. As the artist herself has said, “no moment ever exists in isolation.” While contemplating these small spectacles she has shaped from both the natural world and manmade, it is thrilling to question, again and again, at what point material placed in a new context acquires its own vitality, at what point it begins to forge its own metaphysics.

Written by Chloe Aridjis, Mexican-American Author & Art Critic.