ABOUT / The Dissonant

   

‘Warning!’ The recognizable red­and­white of caution tape is fully embedded in our contemporary imagery. No doubt about it: caution must be observed here. Possessing the direct expressiveness of a traffic sign, your eyes are immediately drawn to it.

The work of Sjimmie Veenhuis has caught your attention. But then, completely unexpectedly, the initial urgency is replaced by confusion. At second glance, the image appears to be less one­dimensional than it seemed in its first exclamation. The orderly, stylized lines slowly lose their strictness. The distant coldness of a supposedly digital production process makes place for crafts­ manship. In contrast to the mass­produced origin of the material, minute flaws in the image reveal the personal handwriting contained within it. Scruti­ nizing the image, your eye follows that handwriting, but the motives behind it never become fully comprehensible, no matter how hard you try. You still lose sight of the road ahead in the semi­transparency of the two­coloured tape, after its initial warning message, and become entangled in a maze of layers.

Diagonal becomes straight, and straight becomes diagonal, as strips of tape that are placed parallel to the frame result in slanted lines and vice versa. Repetitioninterruptstheline,whileastaggerallowsittocontinueunhindered. Reversal seems to be the rule. With a bending of direction, so too the once clear and one­dimensional meaning is bent. Where do the arrows, constructed from two stretches of tape, lead us, if they do not point ahead but upwards? There, still in the first layer of the image, a tension already arises. But what is it exactly that provokes this tension; what is the dissonant? A system that appears simple suddenly proves pretty darn hard to decipher. For Sjimmie, possibilities are concealed within the game of contradictions: “Not being able to define things, that is what keeps it open.”

His fascination for shapes and their reciprocal interactions can be traced to his childhood. “I often wondered how a window could fit into a house. Or my shoe, which I had left lying around on the floor, in the surface of the tv. This kept me occupied. I still view the world that way. I can lose myself in such questions, and in my work I like to fully persist in this way of looking.” That this way of looking can produce unexpected perspectives is proven by the correlation between bubblegum packaging and plastic mushroom trays, which have the same aspect ratio despite their different sizes. “The manner in which I arrange the pieces is dependent on this; the logical outcome of the material I chose.”

Rectangles of blue plastic with the same dimensions over and over; it does not immediately sound like an inexhaustible source of inspiration. And yet, the material proves to be a treasure trove of possibilities. When Sjimmie shows me a relief sculpture of bubblegum packaging, and suggests observing it through my eyelashes, I start to catch on: the inside and outside form two ‘colours’, one of which reflects the light, and the other absorbs it. This creates a play of light and shadow, producing the illusion of three­dimensionality. A spacious­ ness which also changes, and which inverts as soon as you walk around it. This magic must have been lost on the grocery store worker when Sjimmie

started hoarding his packaging there. With demands, even, as not every package fit the criteria. It was the same at the hardware store, where his eye was suddenly caught by the visual power of caution tape. Precisely these most common of objects, which we usually pass by without so much as a glance, are often most suitable as a primary material for Sjimmie’s work.

Whether it is packaging, VHS­tapes, traffic signs or rolls of tape; the matter dictates, lays down the rules and asks the questions. Sjimmie searches for space, solutions, and answers within self­imposed limitations. “The material is a given; I do not choose the proportions, but I have to be able to work with them. It’s up to me to make all those compartments or lines fit together.” 

He deduces an acceptable amount of actions from the proportions and charac­ teristics that define the base material. For example, he builds up a tape piece with a maximum amount of layers, dictated by the measure of transparency of the tape. A colour scheme is naturally derived from his choice of materials. Warning tape is available in red­and­white and yellow­and­black, and so his work with tape consists of one of those colour combinations, or both of them together. With these limitations upon limitations, one might think that the final outcome of the work is anyone’s guess. Nothing could be further from the truth; by reducing the window, the view becomes bigger. “It’s about thinking in possibilities despite limitation. I find freedom of movement within the rules.”

By applying the flat material in layers, a painterly suggestion of depth arises. Tape is more akin to paint than one might initially expect; it can even be mixed. For example, by building it up in semi­transparent layers, almost like glazing, yellows of many shades emerge, varying from soft pastel to bright canary yellow. Depending on the adjacent colours, the yellow in one square leans to red, while in the next square it shifts towards green. In the red­and­white works, shades of pink recede to the background, while white on white becomes brighter, surging forth and jumping at the viewer.

In the first layer, the originally flat tape remains virtually level, but in the next stages, a relief grows of its own accord; the segments, which sometimes resemble thick squares of paint, seem to have been placed on their surface as if by brushstrokes. As it turns out, working with tape even produces the plastic equivalent of craquelure, which starts to emerge after a while. The unforeseen imperfections which result from this make the surface seem even more painterly, and are even emphasized by the reflective properties of the plastic, as though it were a layer of varnish. All in all, a tactility emerges which one could not have suspected in the source material, which confuses the eye and draws one’s hand to the surface. Is this really tape?

A kinship to painting seems surprising, but did not appear from thin air. Paint was the starting point from which Sjimmie started exploring other mediums: “To me, there is no inherent difference between paint or another material. At their core, they are the same. ‘It’s still paint’ is something I say to myself when my perfectionism hinders me.” Using the qualities of paint, he nevertheless does not deny the character of the tape in any way. The once simple­looking material proves to have a mind of its own and harbours many contradictions, which can only strengthen each other by finding the right balance. “I play with the material by allowing it to be itself, by showing it clearly and ‘in your face’, while simultaneously letting it disappear.”

There is no mathematical calculation at the core of these patterns, but a logic of the senses. While creating, Sjimmie balances between his reason and his intuition, between the thorough preparation of a study and the daring to diverge from his preconceived ideas during the execution. Simply because the material forces such divergence, or because his eye is drawn elsewhere. Illustrative of this, he had meticulously planned the site­specific floor instal­ lation Stratum (Herentals, 2018), after which he instinctively made different choices, influenced by the material and the space. The power of the inter­ vention lies in its naked simplicity, which reveals the structure of the existing tile floor that it covers.

Without deviation in the mathematical sense, separate building blocks visually break free from the grid – where they have been carefully placed by Sjimmie, in service of the resonance of the final image – and create a sense of movement. Where the work does not allow itself to be restrained by the laws of the mate­ rial, and where the material does not let itself be restrained by the actions of the maker, variations on the rhythm occur. Those things which sometimes hinder this perfectionist creator during the process of making, often form small, visual adventures to the viewer. One stubborn element breaks out. That is the dissonant.

Merel van den Nieuwenhof, 2021

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