{"id":1277,"date":"2011-11-19T14:22:57","date_gmt":"2011-11-19T14:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/?page_id=1277"},"modified":"2023-05-18T10:35:01","modified_gmt":"2023-05-18T15:35:01","slug":"the-capacious-memory","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/en\/artists\/robbie-cornelissen\/the-capacious-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"The Capacious Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"
October 29 – November 2007
\nRobbie Cornelissen: The Capacious Memory<\/p>\n

Text by Erin Silver<\/p>\n

…despite one\u2019s sense of departing even further from one\u2019s origin, one winds up, to one\u2019s shock, exactly where one had started out. \u2013 Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (2007) If you don\u2019t know where you are going, any road will take you there.\u00ad \u2013 Lewis Carroll<\/p>\n

A faint, asynchronous ruffling can be heard: perhaps the sound of tools, of a creator behind a paper curtain, erecting impenetrable fortresses with mere pencils, digging out harrowing passages with elaborate crosshatching, giving us the illusion of choosing our own adventure as we inquisitively yield to the creator\u2019s chimerical vision. Robbie Cornelissen is both renegade architect and fantastical author, carving out Odyssean epics that escape the confines of the page onto which they are inscribed.<\/p>\n

Meta Knol asks, \u201cWhat world does the artist\u2019s alter ego inhabit\u2014that highly imaginative creature that urges him to draw? What does that reservation of his own imagination look like?\u201d As if recounting the enigmatic elements of a recurring dream, Cornelissen abandons agency, becoming the extension of a pencil in hand that compulsively attempts to arrive at understanding through repetition. However, the pencil is limited by the artist\u2019s knowledge; like Escher\u2019s impossible objects, Cornelissen\u2019s pathways aspire to apexes of awareness, inevitably returning us back to the places at which we began\u2014but propelling us into a psychological beyond.<\/p>\n

\u201cCornelissen\u2019s elastic pencil,\u201d Knol states, \u201cprefers to seek out ambiguity; it winds up in labyrinths\u2014that is the way it goes.\u201d Cornelissen\u2019s animated drawing, Het Grote Geheugen 2006, exemplifies this insight in its winding through both hand-drawn and digital spaces, mimicking the dizzying compartments of the artist\u2019s mind, transplanted into the mind of a faceless figure we encounter at the beginning of our expedition. Timidly roving the alien terrain, we both scrutinize miniscule crevices and absorb vast unpopulated expanses; we take steps forward and steps backward, surveying the space in its complexity and completeness; we stay low to the ground and float up to the ceiling, undaunted by the laws of gravity and dimensionality. Occasional organic forms\u2014a gulping pipe, a hanging mammarian bulge\u2014interrupt this psychological, labyrinthine journey; like the Cheshire Cat, they pop up in unexpected places, act as markers that pronounce, \u201cyou are here,\u201d suggesting to us that we might arrive somewhere\u2014if only we walk long enough.<\/p>\n

Meta Knol, \u201cThe Elastic Pencil,\u201d Het Reservaat, 2003. Knol.<\/div>

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