Publication

PROJECT 13 ROSY-FINGERED DATA

Jouke Kleerebezem

08-09-19 > 03-11-19.

Rozevingerige data (“Rosy-Fingered Data”) is the artist’s first extensive exhibition since 2004’s Exquisite Enclave Exquise at Museum de Paviljoens in Almere. The project ushers in a new phase in his work. With the aid of an iPad and iPhone and his resumption of the use of a studio in 2016, his digital and analogue image production have converged. Through combining a screen that responds to the slightest of touches with the unforgiving material properties of graphite, ink, paint, paper and canvas, Kleerebezem explores new expressive pathways.

Using a touchscreen as an interface for software that converts pen strokes into digital code and enables their manipulation has permitted Kleerebezem to rediscover the fundamental expressive power of line, field and colour. The frictionless digital liberation of his artistic hand has unleashed an unrestrained lyricism and a hybrid use of media in his recent work, which mixes digital and analogue methods. The artist will work in the exhibition space this summer, producing new drawings, paintings, photography and graphic work. On Instagram and the project website, he will reflect on the process of creation and on the context of the media he uses.

The digital format also affords new channels for distribution and reception of the work, e.g., on Instagram and in the artist’s own online publications. Between 1998 and 2005, Kleerebezem published everything he produced, without exception, in “Notes, Quotes, Provocations and Other Fair Use”, one of the first Dutch blogs. In the recent work, analogue and digital processes engage each other. The poetic title Rozevingerige data alludes to Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” and celebrates brave new realities and worlds, artistic ones in particular. While data and algorithms call forth spectres, especially with regard to the use of big data, in many cultural and social environments – and certainly in artistic practice – they also inspire new imagery with a structure and eloquence all its own.

Kleerebezem’s images draw freely on both direct and highly mediated experiences of reality. The ways in which we observe, register, measure and represent the world, in media that are increasingly computerised, determine how we see it and ourselves. In Jouke Kleerebezem’s work, perception continually disintegrates, to be recombined through improvisation, in not necessarily reliable, always temporary wholes.