Hans de Wit
Aftersigns
27th April - 1st June
Opening 26th April 6-8pm
“…it appeared to us as unreasoning Creativity, at once blind and subtle, tender and cruel, caring only to spawn and spawn the infinite variety of beings, conceiving here and there among a thousand inanities a fragile loveliness.’
The Opening Of The Eyes 1954, Olaf Stapledon.
We are very pleased to present our second exhibition with Hans de Wit (Eindhoven, 1952).
For Aftersigns, we present works selected from four recent series of drawings rendered at differing scales. Often de Wit makes his meticulous and orphic works at a scale measured in metres. For this presentation we offer smaller, more singular drawings from four recent series created with the meticulous hand of a master draftsman but also with the mind of of a seer - Aftersigns (2019), Radiation (2021), Nebula (2022) and Conjunction (2022-2023),.
De Wit’s drawings take us into occult and obtuse spaces that might be in parallel with our own or in the distant future or past. Planets and their surfaces pulse with the falling and rising of things. De Wit has stated that the series of drawings, each with its own title, are comparable with chapters in a non-sequential or linear book - the creation and destruction of the Earth may be happening on a single page, with human existence measured merely by a word or two, with massive solar flares reflected in the myriad eyes of the smallest creature. All things have their significance in the cortege of time and space.
Certain subjects may look familiar - perhaps a peat bog, the hull of a ship, the passage of nebulae, an encrustation of mussels on a piling, a toad, a bollard for mooring, the eruption of light from behind a passing object; but their place is not to offer narratives, but rather to set up disturbances in the viewer that may fascinate as much as repel.
All this is done with a consummate arrangement of marks and media - pastels, graphite and photocopy toner to give the deepest blacks. In some work de Wit builds up the application of his materials to form shallow crusts of pigment. As with his usual method of display, the majority of works in ‘Aftersigns’ are simply pinned to the wall, making even our proximity to the work a source of tension, as we need to get close. Almost too close.
De Wit is the subject of the monograph Undertow, published by EposPress Holland, in 2013 on the occasion of his solo show of the same name at the Drawing Centre Diepenheim. Drawings by de Wit are in the collections of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Museum DePont, Tlburg and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.