011221 2002 Toine Horvers Into the Brain
The Rotterdam Medical Faculty building is a very physical one: its snow-white facades, just 33 years old, smooth and still miraculously fresh, still without the creases and stains that come with old age, fold themselves as an elegant skin around the flesh: education and research. All this is supported by a skeleton of massive concrete: formidable columns, beams and girders, with all ducts and cables – the veins – attached to them. This construction of awesome powers never gets brutish: down to the minutest detail everything is delicately shaped, the way only True Creators can. In all its halls, corridors and rooms the building presents its structure and constructed-ness to the naked eye with the icy precision of the disection room: interiors as anatomical samples.
          In an elevator-hall on the twelfth floor four wall-drawings can be seen – or rather: coloured writings and scribblings, distributed in the four celestial directions of the space. They are the work of Rotterdam visual artist Toine Horvers (Loon op Zand, 1947), who ascended into this Realm of Concrete and Science on an Orphic mission, armed only with fragile tools: crayons, pencil sharpeners, fluorescent light, slide-projections, and an artist’s fascination for anatomical atlases: in them, the human body is mapped, like a work of architecture, along three main axes – coronal, sagittal and axial. A careful observer of these cloud-like shapes may decipher Latin words: ‘pons’, ‘fissura horizontalis’, ‘corpus callosum’, ‘lobulus parietalis’ and the like – guided by slides, Horvers wrote the names of all gyri, lobi and sulci that he found in 16 sagittal sections of the human brain over both elevator-walls (one for each half of the brain); likewise he put those of 40 coronal sections over both passages to the lateral corridors. Superimposing sets of sections, of 0.5 cms each originally, onto one plane he produces images that hover like mirages over the bare concrete. The faint force of a human hand made indelible imprints upon the staunch, staggering solidity of the architectural structure.
          Unlike classic ‘trompe l’oeil‘-mural paintings, e.g. frescoes in Renaissance and Baroque churches, Horvers’ ethereal wall-drawings do not try to hide or deny the underlying architecture. The sheer flimsiness of the words written here rather assert the mass of the concrete slabs. At the same time these words are ‘signs’ that ‘sign-ify’ the building’s skeleton, thus transforming the elevator-hall into a ‘cranial cavity’ inside the body of the Faculty-building.
          Like in the actual brain, the ‘corpus callosum’ forms the imaginary centre of this three-dimensional monumental representation of it. The observer’s eye is ‘in medio’ – in the middle – of this panopticum. Unlike the scientific atlases that are his point of reference, Horvers’ images are not life-like, but rather descriptive – and yet the shapes that are generated by this transposition of Nature into Art miraculously resemble the actual brain, both in outline and structure. These images stimulate the imagination.
          For many years, Horvers has been fascinated by data of all sorts, and the systems into which they are organised: e.g. maps and the names of streets of large cities, registers of the flows and tides of the waters of rivers and seas, meteorological data, records of the movements of ships into and out of the port of Rotterdam, and the results of scientific research as deposited in anatomical atlases. At first glance unartistic, ‘dry’ and ‘unpersonal’, he considers them as ‘compressed energy’, products of long-term rituals of observation: ‘ready-made’ artistic material, ‘the stuff that art is made of’ (cf. Shakespeare).
          Horvers’ artistic procedures are hermetically strict and severe: methodically, almost mechanically he rewrites the given sets of data onto sheets of paper – or, as is the case here, onto walls -, types them into computers for digital display, or reads them aloud into microphones – often he uses the voices of third parties - to make them audible. Endlessly repeating the process, he weaves this material into multi-layered ‘clouds’ of image or sound, thereby blurring the original dryness and exactitude of his ‘stuff’. The finished works, often temporal and/or visually, audibly or physically fragile, widely transcend their prozaic origins, inviting the observer into the realm of the imagination.
          Horvers stresses the ritual quality of both Art and Science. To him, his own working methods as well as the scientific research by which the data were gathered in the first place, are “ritual dances around the Great Unknown”. Horvers: “Scientists often present themselves as functional and merely focussed on results. However, reading Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’, I do experience a ritual element in his Quest for Knowledge. Maybe the only difference between art and science is that artists more readily acknowledge this ritual quality.”
© Guus Vreeburg / Het Oog, Rotterdam; 011221