A shut mouth catches no flies
Lea van Vlodrop and Simon Scharinger are both Fine Art Painting students in their fourth year at AKI, Academy of Art&Design in Enschede. We regularly give students still studying at the AKI the chance to show their work in the Vrijhof's exhibition rooms. And every time it is a feast for the mind, young artists, in development, who with an open mind show us what they are thinking about , what moves them.
Artist Statement Simon Scharinger:
Simon Scharinger says he believes that art and its vivid, unconventional expressions carries the capacity to feel and look as opposed to simply see; to listen rather than only to hear. Painting, for him, is the arm that reaches out, gets in touch, cultivates and preserves life. Instead of presenting a manifesto aimed at changing the world, his work serves as a poetic form of (re)imagining and (re)challenging our relationship with ourselves, others and the world. The way he approaches the art practice borders on a phenomenological-& meditative attitude where the method employed is a reflective approach that seeks to map the human experience as it manifests through the artistic process.
Simon’s expressions are about forms of immediacy, transforming the inside out— raw & brute; no obscurance, to surpass this swallowing, silencing mode of deflection. He uses and understands the canvas in his artistic practice as a filter which absorbs; a web that traps what otherwise gets through but never really leaves. That which stays is a remembrance of what cannot be ignored, should not be avoided & must not be denied. The expressive gestures in his paintings have been concentrated into (re)marks, imprints that are left behind like scars: A reverent of itself, by itself, for itself, to itself & in itself. Not what you see is what you get, but what is left is what you end up with. The ultimum, the afterimage, carefully following its traces.
Artist Statement Lea van Vlodrop:
Within her artistic practice, Lea van Vlodrop explores the interplay between language, signs, and symbols. Language serves as a subject but also as a tool on how to produce work. Similar to how letters form words, words form sentences, and sentences express ideas, she perceives her work as individual characters converging to interact and question each other, shaping their own idiosyncratic system.
Drawing builds the backbone of her practice. It helps her to decipher what her eyes find attractive and to store ideas that later might be (re)introduced into a painting. Lea seeks to blur the lines between abstraction, figuration, and decoration without imposing a linear understanding of the images she generates. She is fascinated by the similarities and differences between the symbolism of unrelated origins and how these categories can result in confrontational friction between the universal and the personal that transcend cultural and temporal boundaries. Other than that, van Vlodrop is fascinated by Painting itself, concerning the questions it can stimulate regarding itself and, in consequence, questions regarding how she can include sublayers of themes of memory and everyday life.
