My practice as an artist is directed towards building a relationship with the ‘incomprehensibility of life’. I have built my artistic practice around an empty space through which information can flow, information that comes from a source that is not me. This is the ‘architecture of inner space’. I have developed relationships with what I call ‘fields of interest’ that include architecture, music and geometry, but also shamanism or prehistoric cave art. These fields of information have, in an ever-changing diversity and intensity, their influence on the process of making art. In fact, all these fields are also areas of art. 

The way I handle this process of making is by experiencing these fields as living beings, not just techniques or tools. Geometrical forms, for instance, can be viewed as tools to calculate or measure or to develop models of analysis or prediction, but I see them as a sort of living beings that have a life of their own to which we can relate and with whom we co-exist on levels that we do not understand. This living together in ways the mind cannot grasp is the point of departure in my work. As a result, the developments in my work and the forms and relationships that come into being seem to bring about a sense of newness and amazing happenings.

In the two series of ‘deep drawing’, presented in this catalog, the central motive is the grid, a pattern of regularly spaced horizontal and vertical lines. Often, we view the grid or the diagram as a tool to measure certain areas and to engage in all kinds of calculations, etc. However, I also handle the grid as a living being, that feels the aspects of line and color. The coloring of the grid, for instance, creates a sensitive environment in which all kinds of forms can live and develop attitudes towards their surroundings. 

In ‘deep drawing I’, geometrical forms have taken the shape of octagons that approach the grid with feelings of amazement and wonder. They sense their environment and are trying to figure it out. In ‘deep drawing II’, the grid itself produces forms as living entities that experience themselves as spirit beings. These drawings can be viewed as a play or as the development of concrete forms without any reference, but they also reveal the sensitive and feeling part of art and of life itself. 

gerard van der horst