Hans Theys


Moresque Pencil Turrets and Blue-Dotted Rays
About Tamara Van San's Work


Tamara Van San’s work stages a permanent emergence of images out of matter. No stuff for learned know-alls, but a paradise for people who believe in the existence of what Luc Tuymans has called physical intelligence. Here, we see how forms can beget other forms and silently stir up thoughts and feelings. Balloons filled with PU foam burst open, showing a fragile green plant. Amorphous or unidentifiable piles, sprayed or covered with brightly-coloured paint, drift into our field of vision like new coral varieties, mountain crystals, fish looking like birds or Moresque pencil turrets.

As a child, this artist used to leaf through atlases and illustrated reference books. In her work, which is both playful and sublime (darkness seeps from the texture as one takes a closer look at it), this perpetual amazement returns. How wonderfully free these sculptures are! Incredibly well-baked, cut loose from all prejudice, like radical paintings pushed into the space. Sometimes they have a poetic, moving and sometimes disturbing effect, because they are a cheerfully dark mirror of the incongruity and permanent renewal of reality around us.

This is genuine poetry, as it is conceived by such artists as Panamarenko and Tarkovski: an irregular composition of outlandish, impalpable forms, colours, materials, textures, grids, rhythms and other invisible things, which calls to mind the untamed or reluctant ways of reality. And yet, Van San is not reconstructing images once seen, as in Panamarenko’s ‘Crodociles’ or ‘Boots with Snow’, or capturing a moment, as in Andrei Roebljov. Rather, she is radically developing of forms which, with surprising agility, render possible new or old experiences. And as the night looms behind the dew-laden flower at dawn, a careful observation of some of these beautiful forms seems to learn us more about an underlying, dark and shapeless world.

Van San works with an unhoped-for wealth of materials: bamboo branches lacquered brightly green, bricks painted in pink, yellow wool, tin foil balls, silicone daubs, tape, painted and plastered ping-pong balls, footballs, beach balls and kangaroo balls, PU foam hemispheres, polyurethane, polyester, plaster, nylon stockings, alphabet soup letters sprayed in fluorescent colours, marbles, feathers, play dough, and so on. The wonderful individual sculptures are often made beforehand and are subsequently scattered throughout the space in such a way as to give it an entirely new sculptural rhythm, making it in a mysterious way accessible and hospitable again. Here is a young artist who, after Panamarenko, after Ann Veronica Janssens, after Joëlle Tuerlinckx and after Honoré ∂’0, has created a uniquely individual and radical work, with the same poetic and political intensity, but if possibly even more liberated, even closer to us.

I asked Van San to name the most beautiful things she has ever seen. “The sky,” she replied, “an orange sun, a blue-dotted ray, the market in Fez, the sea, buoys, lighthouses, greener grass, red tree crabs, fog, a game with coloured counters, a black shining tiger-like animal in the zoo, jellyfish, an oil tanker, people, a tower in Casablanca, falling stars, fish nets, water lilies, butterflies in Romenia, Chott El Cherid, a sand storm, piles of fruit and vegetables, Jerusalem, a watchtower, the desert, a wall.”

Montagne de Miel, 6 June 2008 – 6 June 2009