About Wouter Klein Velderman

The most important thing for an artist is to trust images and feelings. The images that come up in his mind and the positive feelings they arouse when he is planning on realising them. The sculptures and installations by Wouter Klein Velderman have the intuitive straightforwardness that for me reveals the true artist at work. He talks about his work in terms of what it is and how he is going to make it, never about what it should communicate. When he plans to make a couple of huge 3D versions from certain forms and figures on a Hieronymus Bosch painting from old tents, he does not bother to explain the relation between image and material. Tent cloth and pipes are the material he likes to work with at the moment and the Bosch imagery is what he would like to see. Meaning is for the poor of heart. Only when I asked him once to tell me what he would dream of making in ten years he answered that his ambition would be to make a large show that would arouse an immense feeling of disappointment for the public.

An artist should be able to disappear inside the execution of his plans. There are several ways to arrive at this point. One would be a meditative approach: to be able to direct all attention to hands and eyes. Another one is to plan things that in one way or the other are so large that they will consume you anyway. In all his works Wouter clearly chooses the second path. Large plans followed by times of intense but cheerful work. I have had the pleasure to follow Veldermans development closely during the two years he worked at the Sandberg and I am impressed and delighted by the speed and swiftness of it.

“This is the business we have chosen” Is a temporary sculpture for a relatively narrow, rectangular, uneven public square in Brussels. It is made in the context of “Europalia” a public art festival for young artists from all EU countries. The work consists of two storage constructions that are filled like bookshelves with thick but flat, multicoloured forms. These are commodities, products that appear to be unique but which are put together from a small set of variables. The fact that they can be read as a critique on the precooked format of the show is a component but not the most important quality of the sculpture. The work engages on different levels with the formal and functional attributes of its surroundings. It resembles the city elevator, which is situated at the top end of the square in constructive appearance and in the sense of the elevated objects. The colours work like a harsh echo from the different pastel stucco facades. With this work Velderman succeeds to make a public sculpture that to a large extend blends in with the environment without being ephemeral, vague or camouflaged in any sense. I consider that as a major achievement.


Gijs Frieling.
2006