Sculpture, space, and the flair of the material

It would not be unreasonable to interpret the slender and somewhat irregularly hewn body of the towering sculpture as the figure of two bodies in the act of being lifted up. But while its title ‘Hoch hinaus’ [Aiming High] might just seem to echo what we are actually seeing, in reality its meaning goes much further, and it is by no means exhausted in merely duplicating the object in language terms. When someone is ‘aiming high’, it is all about ambition and success. The same metaphorical teasing applies to ‘Leaning’ (2018), a sculpture fashioned from a roughly hewn granite stele, which in turn supports a strut of scorched oak twice its height. And just as the title literally reflects the sculpture’s form, the paired arrangement of the two elements easily evokes an anthropomorphic projection that allows us to forget the materials “per se” and to overwrite them, as if the work actually ‘meant’ two figures leaning against each other.

Also leaning, but as if in the wake of chaos following a collision in unstable equilibrium, the sculpture ‘Collision’ formed from a block of marble and diabase takes us into a more expansive field of associations than ‘Leaning’ does. And although the shape is intended and the stones consequently are left “askew”, they evidently depict a (literal) “inclination”. In this instance, too, the title references far more than just the mutual relationship of these two objects. One can imagine two opinions – if not world views – colliding, illustrated through the contrast between marble and diabase, the black and white reflex of the most rudimentary scheme of perception. Yet with its contrast of the noble yet soft marble on the one hand and the unspectacular yet hard basalt rock diabase on the other, ‘Collision’ describes not least the delineation of the sculpture itself. What is left in suspension, literally, is whether black was half drawing in or whether white was half sinking in – to quote (very loosely) a well-known verse from Goethe’s “The Fisher”. The titles of the almost closed forms featured in ‘Intimate’ and ‘United’ and the precarious equilibrium states of ‘Take Off’, ‘Verlass’, ‘Weightless’ and ‘Balance’ can certainly be considered along similar lines; ‘In Between’, however, draws our attention to the “void” between three soaring cherry-wood poles, just as it does with ‘Hollow’, the empty space enclosed by a curvature.

Jan Douma sees himself first and foremost as a sculptor. His physical as well as intuitive relationship with the sculptural is due to a profound awareness and unerring sense of body and space, of how art objects influence one another, of how they not only behave within a spatial context but how they alter it, too, by shaping their surroundings. As far as these conditions are concerned, Douma operates within a classical script, i.e. within a tradition handed down from antiquity, in that his conception of space is derived from the corporeal. Sculptures objectify themselves as constructs of mass and statics – but that is not all. In the case of the megalithic sculptures, the entity of which comprises a fusion of several components, the medium expands to include the “negative space”, a paradigm characteristic of modernism, as the Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM) demonstrated in a comprehensive show in 2019. At this vast sprawling exhibition, hundreds of exhibits addressed the theme of modern sculpture in its relationships to diverse spatial constellations, from open spaces to enclosed spaces, hollow spaces, spaces in-between, all the way to virtual spaces. Douma’s works are situated in precisely this context – and by no means in exceptional instances only. As the case of the titular ‘In Between’ elaborates, empty spaces and intermediate spaces, distances and intervals rank equally with the material conditions of mass, stasis and gravitation. The corporeal materiality defines the voids, much in the same way that they contribute to modelling the material forms in a reciprocal bond.

The merging of two initially radically different constituents, namely the plinth and what is serves to stage, could be seen as contradictory vis-à-vis the voids. ‘Black on Black’ – and, similarly, the pigmented ‘Take Off’ – inject an art-immanent note into the formal structure. And while the erstwhile difference between the traditional substructure and the figure remains visible as a join, both works deconstruct, re-assess and upgrade the plinth to an autonomous element of the sculpture. In ‘Black on Black’ for example, the black diabase plinth repurposed in this way fuses with an elongated ashlar of scorched cherry wood to form a unified body.

Depending on the choice and nature of the relevant components, a reductionist system in the form of a basic grammatical structure offers a wellspring of possible combinations. The compositional limitation to, for the most part, just two or three elements yields a tremendous freedom in the choice of materials. Under the pre-determined dichotomies of “natural:artificial” and “organic:inorganic”, we have combinations of wood with stone, wood with wood, stone with stone, and occasionally even iron or concrete. These patterns in turn differentiate themselves further according to the processing methods, specifically into hewn stone, chiselled wood, shaped iron and cast concrete, with characteristic structures that express themselves in the haptic properties of the surfaces and reveal the aesthetics intrinsic to the materials.

The use of scorched wood illustrates just how imaginatively Douma varies his material pairings. He uses a propane burner not just to blacken the raw material he intends to use, but also occasionally to set it alight and then extinguish it. Besides the arrangement of the forms themselves, this special material treatment emphasises the surface textures, as is the case with natural materials, as well as the colours, the interplay of which is all the more important as an additional artistic input. With a keen sense of purpose, Douma brings out the colours of the materials: the speckled grey of the granite, the restrained brown tone of the oak, and the warm reddish tinge of the cherry wood. By the same token, the minimalist conception has the effect of reciprocally intensifying the colour tones, which often consist merely of two tones in correlation to each other. This effect is enhanced further whenever the decision tends towards “achromatic” colours, towards black and white, also known as “non-colours”. Whenever the interaction of dark diabase with light marble occurs as an extreme contrast, a new register opens up with the scorched wood; indeed, besides the velvety surface, the pigment too creates an additional charm. ‘Clan’ (2020) impresses as a successful example of atmospheric flair. A key characteristic of the charring is the fact that neither the texture of the material nor its colour predominates; also, that the pigment is not applied to a colour substrate, but is “manufactured”. As the product of the transformation of a natural substance and a chemical conversion it becomes an authentic substance with a microstructure that is innovative for Douma’s oeuvre. With ‘Equal’, ‘United’, ‘Intimate’, ‘Leaning’, ‘Clan’ and ‘Black on Black’, it is first and foremost the more recent works (2019–2021) that one might group together as a “Black Series”, albeit with various antecedents.

What sculpture cannot achieve, painting certainly does. The colour stripes running in vertical parallels are the formal principle of a discrete group of paintings. As the continuation of his sculptures into a second medium, Douma’s oil and acrylic paintings are also subject to a reductionist order. However, the two-dimensional flatness which might make them appear less complex at first glance compared with the three-dimensional works does provide a platform for the almost limitless abundance of nuances in colour. ‘Afterglow’ (Nachglühen, 2021) could be regarded as a reference picture. The colour temperature of the almost strictly geometric sequence of crimson, brown and black stripes is interrupted by a bright, pinkish band which, with its irregular texture, stands out prominently from the evenly painted stripes, dividing the picture into two zones with its light effect. There is also the suggestion of a shift to an illusionistic space, as if a curtain were opening in the foreground. With its title ‘Afterglow’ and its exclusively warm colours, the painting takes on a meaning that refers to a reality beyond, so that, although abstract and geometric in structure, it should not be attributed to the Concrete Art genre, appearances notwithstanding. The picture surface of ‘Interference’ (2021) is more succinctly divided by the contrast between warm and cold colours while in ‘Night and Day’ (2021) cold and warm colours are aggressively offset against one another. That such polarities are set out conceptually is explicitly expressed in the title ‘Black vs. White’ (2019), a composition in which the stripes break out from their geometric order.

 As Jan Douma himself says, he likes to express himself ‘in parallel’ in both artistic media, i.e. with certain interrelationships becoming apparent already in the production process. A mottled shade of grey combined with black in acrylic paint is later repeated in a sculpture made of granite and scorched oak; or, indeed, vice versa, with the pleasant reddish tinge of the cherry wood re-emerging in the warm tones of an oil painting. In this reciprocal relationship, painting could be classified as a “derivative” of sculpture, rather like mathematics, a translation from 3D to 2D, just as the opposite holds true, with painting inspiring sculpture. ‘Meandering’ is the term the artist uses to describe this back and forth between the two “métiers”. The fact that he opts for muted colours as a matter of principle rather than brash effects corresponds to the restrained material colours of the sculptures. Indeed, their intensity derives from an assured sense of nuance and a well-practised eye for what can and cannot be combined. The organic transitions, overlaps and interferences between the two areas are the indications that, whether painted or sculpted, this is a coherent artistic cosmos governed by a consistent logic.

Even if a decidedly reductionist approach opens up unimagined scope for combinations, variations, transformations and oppositions, a key factor persists nonetheless. And just as the elements deployed, the creative pieces, create bonds – whether in paired arrangements, grouped together as is the case with ‘Clan’ or as commingling colours – they ‘energise’ themselves in an extended sense to become “protagonists” that follow only the one intent characteristic of human beings as a whole, namely to build relationships, to interact, and to communicate.

Herbert M. Hurka – 2022, Freiburg i. Br

Jan Douma. Sculpture and Painting

Jan Douma uses all manner of materials and artistic methods: stone, wood, concrete, and iron for his sculptures; oil and acrylic for his paintings. And yet all in the artist’s oeuvre is of a piece.

Douma’s sculptures feature a tremendous formal clarity throughout and address themes that are key to the medium of sculpture: bearing and loading, motion and stasis, rest and equilibrium. What’s more, the artist meanders through many manifestations. Indeed, his works alternate between softness and hardness; their surfaces are both processed and unprocessed, with flat sections alongside fully rounded and corporeal volumes. The artist has noted that his works are about ‘tracing the interplay between form, material and surface’. His works emerge as part of a process, in the act of doing; indeed, he rarely makes any preliminary sketches. As he himself has said, he tries to ‘maintain an openness while incorporating the unfinished, the random and the flawed’.

His minimalist approach to materials has resulted in a work process that focuses less on the chiselling and modelling typical of traditional sculpting. Instead, the main emphasis of his artistic activity is on processes that involve leaning, placing and stacking. Douma forgoes figurative aspects as his intent is not to replicate the world around him; rather, he seeks an emotional charge of physical and spatial experiences through the presentation of forms and form references. The three works ‘Equal’, ‘Intimate’ and ‘United’ compellingly evoke the embodiment of human forms of existence. Fashioned from scorched oak and ash, they depict various aspects of duality. Two stele-like columns rise up next to each other (Equal); two others are locked in intimate embrace (Intimate) while the third pair melds into a single piece (United). The theme of encounter and interaction is also apparent in the works ‘Clan’ and ‘Clan (II)’. The work entitled ‘Hollow’ made of scorched cherry wood also belongs to these works, which are to be understood as metaphors and represent the idea of the living and changeable. Preceding these works was the large installation ‘Waiting’ from 2015, which first went on display at the Mörfelden-Walldorf Bürgerpark. In thisinstance several softly shaped steles made of concrete of different sizes assume the character of standing figures in highly abstracted form, combining to form a looselyassembled group. Drawing closer to the group, the viewer inevitably finds themself comparing their own physical size to that of the works, which are between 1.75 and 2.30 m tall, and the very fact of sounding out these proportions serves to bring the experience of body and space together.

Most of the works created are even more reduced in terms of form, with a concurrence between the representation and the represented. ‘Weightless’, ‘Collision’ and ‘Uplifted’ are entirely abstract, thriving on the coincidence between two separate elements of different materiality in a non-hierarchical arrangement. They invite said viewer to sense their surfaces with their eyes and perceive different colour nuances and structures. This produces a dialogue about the contrasts and similarities between the two partners. Strictly speaking, we are in fact dealing with a trialogue here, given that there is yet another partner in this dialogue. Douma is interested not only in theformations of marble, gneiss, diabase and limestone, but also in the space between them since it shapes the character of the arrangements in equal measure. In the case of these three sculptures, the stones are either resting on or leaning against one another. This adds a time-related aspect as it creates a moment of contact, a hiatus within an unstable spatial situation. These sculptures ignite at the minusculepoint of contact where the two stones meet.

A similar idea is inscribed in the two works ‘Leaning’ and ‘Transition’. They, too, function via a simple gesture, namely the contact between a compact yet coarsely hewn granite block and a scorched oakwood stele. Here, too, it is not just about what is materially present, but what is ‘in between’, i.e. the ‘void’. The viewer’s interest thus shifts from the works themselves to the way in which they interact with the space that surrounds them, with their context.

The interaction between inner and outer space is also the theme of the two tubular concrete sculptures ‘Captured’ and ‘Intimate Space’. Here the artist explores the way in which sculpture probes and sounds out space. The vertical opening in the outer envelope of the hollow column-like sculptures awakens a desire to feel one’s way inside it, to delve into their depths, as it were.

Placing, leaning, and stacking: it is not the forceful intervention in the sculptural material, but the reduction to simple actions that is a continually recurring motif within Douma’s oeuvre. In the works referred to earlier (Leaning and Transition), the individual design elements connected by leaning against one another; but ‘Upright Angle’ from 2015 comprises an old oak beam, a found object, lying next to an upright granite stele. In addition, there is a whole series of works involving the stacking of modules. In ‘Counterparts’, a tongue-shaped object crafted from beautifully grained olive wood rests on a similarly shaped partner made of deep black scorched ash. In ‘Black on Black’, 2020, a block of scorch-blackened cherry wood stands on an ashlar of diabase that is at least just as intensely black. The concrete sculpture ‘Verlass’ [Reliance], 2018, consists of three elements stacked one on top of the other. Yet the structure thus erected is by no means static; indeed, its lightness is nothing if not vibrant and playful. This stacked work ushers in the 1.85 m tall work entitled ‘Take Off’, 2021, made of shotcrete. But here only two elements were placed on top of each other. Rising from a stable, short plinth is an elongated, finger-like element, pointing upwards.

Take Off was developed further still in May 2022 when Jan Douma took part in the fourth edition of the Radolfzell Sculpture Symposium on the Mettnau peninsula. The theme Between Earth and the Heavens gave rise to the 2.80 m tall, two-part work ‘Hoch hinaus’ [Aiming High] fashioned from oak. Again, a lower section forms a sort of plinth. A slightly curved wooden segment reaches upwards, but here it is not stacked, merely nestling up against it. Once again, the artist has realised a clear sculptural concept and divided the oak trunk with logic, system, and economy of form. The aim is not didactic clarity, but a sensuous sculptural presence that allows the work to assert itself within the vast outdoor premises of the park.

In his paintings, Douma often works with vertically arranged stripes of varying width and vividness. Here, too, the themes of ‘encounter’ and ‘touch’ emerge through the interweaving of opposing expressions, echoing his three-dimensional works. In ‘Solemn’ or ‘Night and Day’, the broad stripes are associated with the fine trace ofhorizontally applied brushstrokes; in ‘Plaza’, deeper layers of paint appear to push their way up to the surface to take part in the action. The application and subsequentremoval of multiple layers of paint creates a balanced colour mood that also unfolds a powerful spatial effect. The arrangement and orientation of these bands of colour, slightly out of kilter with geometry and partially superimposed, create a dynamic vibrancy, a moment of transition within a completely abstract spatiality. Thecomposition of these striped pictures is as minimalist as his sculptures. But because these bands are not entirely parallel, the viewer’s eye tends to linger, gaining a sense not only of the proportional and the relational, but also the lively dialogue between the shapes and the colours.

In his sculpture ‘In Between’ from 2008, the towering bars are again not quite parallel: they are slightly twisted in on themselves, packing the sculpture with vital energy. The way the design material is worked also changes in the paintings, not unlike the different surface finishes of his three-dimensional works.

Besides a rather gestural brushstroke characterised by strong structuring, there is a smooth application of paint that effaces any distinctive signature style. The titles of the paintings, like those of the sculptures, are often similarly expressive; found by association at the completion of each work process, they are by no means intended as explanations.

Given the clear structure of the striped pictures, paintings such as ‘Encounter’, ‘Ambivalent’ or ‘Black vs. White’ might come as something of a surprise. Here curvaceous, organically merging sections predominate, their vividness opening up individual areas of the painting while closing down others. But even here there is no denying the affinity with the three-dimensional works. Indeed, the interlocked elements on the surfaces of the paintings match the folded-back elements of the objects, opening up an entire space. This kinship is most clearly apparent if we compare the painting ‘Ambivalent’, 2019, with the two-part sculpture ‘Uplifted’. An untitled painting from 2020 might in fact be something of ‘missing link’ between these curved delineations and the striped paintings. It features a reddish band next to sharply angled yet tightly interlocked shapes. It is a calm and almost minimalistcomposition, and a perfect match for the similarly compact and connected sculpture ‘Clan’ created the same year.

‘Interference’ is the title of a square-shaped work from 2021. Like a curtain barely drawn aside, it offers a glimpse of a rearward plane. As such it is programmatic since these ‘interferences’, i.e. these superimpositions and overlaps, are situated precisely in the mysterious ‘in-between’ rendered visible by Jan Douma’s sculptures andpaintings.

Dr Antje Lechleiter

Freiburg, August 2022