The subtitled drawings of Marcel van Eeden are often delivered as visual novels within which fictional characters walk through parallel narratives. His images are particular in their literary rhythm and poetic tone as they often touch upon the grit of modernisation. Simon van Eeden, his son, has seen all this work come to life and leave the house: he’s witnessed all the writing and drawing his father ever created from behind his drawing table.
While Marcel aspired to become a poet and ended up as a storytelling draftsman, Simon became a writer and philosopher. In an empirical study of his father’s work – the close reading of the lines and the specificity of the tone – he was led to a conceptual reaching out for the very line and tone buried within the work. In the actual setting of each line, a tone unfolds. The gesture and the story each stem from the material drawn with, and drawn upon.
This conceptualising and close reading is brought together in this book and this exhibition. With utmost worthiness, this outcome offers an intimate debate on the act of drawing as a declaration as well as a form of reflection in the face of a finality
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Exhibition will run from 27 May to 21 June 2017.
