Laureates of the 2013/2015 JCE
BLOMMESTIJN Frank & VAN DER WERF Michiel - The Netherlands
The central theme of our work is the position of art in contemporary society and the role that the artist plays in it. We relate the current phenomena and developments in society to ourselves and to our work. What does society expect from young artist like ourselves? What is expected from art in general? Is there such a thing as a spectacular piece of art? Is it acceptable for an artist to openly admit he want to be famous? As artists, are we a slave of popular taste or should we be indifferent to it and focus on our own preference?
We create artwork that bridges the gap between the elitist art world and mass society. Our work still convinces its audience, it is of the highest quality standard and it is authentic, personal and universally valuable. This may sound pretentious but it actually boils down to the fact that we embrace concepts like plagiarism, sensationalism, easy accessibility and entertainment. We strip these concepts of their negative connotations. Provided that these concepts are used in the right context of course. We like clichés because they speak a universal language.
Although we explore selectively and intuitively, we still believe that our conclusions are worth communicating. The most important notion is that we use ourselves as starting position and sounding board. We aim to create artwork that is personal, vulnerable, and seemingly nonjudgmental. We have no time for negative provocations and nagging. We prefer to be constructive, naive and ambitious.
We love meaningless details that nobody notices. We feel this is of crucial importance to our work. Our work often borders the realm of cliché. However it is key that we are super serious about our pranks. We are not afraid to use comedy in our work and we let our audience wonder if our work is serious or not.
KRISTOF Krisztián - Hungary
Krisztián Kristóf builds visions and deconstructs stories. Be it his drawings bent from ferroconcrete, his videos, animations, or his dream-like graphics; by experimenting with various story-telling forms he creates a re-structured narrative with a permuted timescale based on condensation, emphasis and parallels. Unlike in the usual linear structure of the genre, in his work Roadmovie, the various episodes of the narrative appear in a parallel fashion, yet their narrative connection is not lost. Elements of the story break into minute pieces, as if the planes of space and time have been fused, and it was time that was fracturing space. This form of pictorial storytelling could be likened to the logic of certain narrative paintings, where various stages of the story appear next to each other within the space of the image. Here, it is the slices of a larger space that the short video-loops present, a space whose everyday appearance at once increases and legitimates the surreal nature of the events enfolding within it.
With the aim of creating continuous dialogue and improvised experimentation, Krisztián Kristóf has been working together with Tamás Kaszás and other artists under the name of Randomroutines. One of their works is a series of videos produced in the frame of a nomadic journey (Riddle Loop, 2010) that can be understood as an earlier stage of Roadmovie. The dream-like, fractured narrative logic and the experiments with representing a splintered temporality are typical of other projects by Krisztián Kristóf and the Randomroutines: scratched on the pieces of a broken, sooty sheet of glass, in a ferroconcrete drawing the size of a house, in an animated video or a fragile installation of drawings, these experiments always take the form of the given genre, and are supplemented by the artist’s distinctive iconographic system.
Borbála Szalai
CIURANA GELI Adrià - Spain
Gadget gone wrong.
“I am able to swim in life, but I am too heavy for this mystical hovering.”
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
The image of a gadget that looks like a rosary gone wrong is a visual neologism which provides continuity with our tradition of impossible gadgets destined to wander forever through strange landscapes. We are talking about a tradition, by the way, that began in the 19th century thanks to, or maybe as the fault of, the difficult relationship between tradition and modernity or, to put it better, perhaps, between religion and technological secularisation. Beginning with The tale of cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the steel flea by Nikolai Leskov and ending with Collodi’s unfortunate Pinocchio (both works published in 1881) – without forgetting forerunners as illustrious as The lead soldier, written by Andersen in 1838 – these are always stories featuring alienated man-made gadgets contemplating reality from their privileged isolation – flea, puppet or, in the latter instance, soldier – inviting us to review our version of the world with that rare “mystical hovering” ability coveted by Kierkegaard (a contemporary of all of them, of course).
Adrià Ciurana is not a nineteenth-century artist but, to a certain point, he continues to experience that old tension between the sacred sphere – without a body – and mechanical corporality as something very real (in the manner, to make ourselves clear, of La Mettrie). His “challenging rosaries” speak to us of all this and, also, of a form of temporality we should never have lost; of the importance of moving the point of view down to ground level, which is precisely where most things happen (we should think of Feuerbach, another nineteenth-century man trapped between the material and the spiritual), and of the need to continue randomly conjuring in search of new possibilities for a language which, in its ordinary form – everyday use – is exhausted. This is what it is all about: the dynamic of Ciurana’s work recalls that of the Surrealist poets and the Dadaists, all of them demiurges of the absurd plunged headlong into the transcendental.
The jury
President of the jury: Marc Partouche, Director of the Académie royale des beaux-arts de Bruxelles, Belgium
The members of the jury:
Edwin Becker, Head curator of exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Christine Jamart, Chief editor of Art Même magazine, Brussels
Olivier Kaeser, Director of the Swiss Cultural Center, Paris
Marta Gili, Director of the Jeu de Paume, Paris
Alessandro Lupi, artist, Genoa/Berlin
Juliana Mrvova, artist and independent curator, Bratislava
Philippe Régnier, Chief editor of the Quotidien de l’Art
Alain Reinaudo, Advisor for visual arts and architecture, Deputy director of the Department of artistic exchange and cooperation, Institut français, Paris
Thaddaeus Ropac, Gallerist, Salzburg
Jérôme Cassou, Réalisateur Arte France, Paris
Yann Toma, artist / Professor at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris/New York.
Eudald Camps