The And was an exhibition at ZingerPresents in Amsterdam in 2009. At the time, I had just returned from a three month stay in New York where I spent so much time reading books, that the edges between the world inside and outside of a book started to blur. The press release, written by Steven van Grinsven, said this about the exhibition:
…In ʻt Veld draws his inspiration from a wide array of sources: philosophy, art history as much as literature touch upon his practice to conjure up an idiosyncratic lexicon that is the artistʼs own, but which shares its sensibilities with the poetic conceptualism of the Sixties.
If through language we attest to the values and qualities of everything visual, then the words of T.S. Elliot, ʻʻIt is not the arrival but the journey that mattersʼʼ , give literary substance to the visual deconstruction and semantics at play in the practice of the artist. ʻThe And,ʼ as the title suggests, is neither the beginning nor the end of the works on display, but a lingering trace implicit of its continuity.
For his exhibition at ZINGERpresents for example: five copies of a mass-market paperback, ʻMore Adventures on Other Planetsʼ (D. Wollheim, 1963)ʼ , occupy a single shelf. Each brings with it its own unique history whilst their combined presence alludes to a broader collective sphere. The uncertainty about the prior owners, their experiences and adventures, opens the door to a Noirish interrogation of history and the transcendental qualities of objecthood. Despite the restrained, near puritanical language of the works on display each offers a broad, nearly endless string of open-ended possibilities; as if in the practice of Martijn in ʻt Veld everything, even something as mundane as a cup of coffee, exists entangled within the philosophy of time and space.
