Letters


Fragment from a letter to Klaas and Heleen Gubbels:

....

While asleep during the utterly dark nights here in France, I am increasingly confronted, more often still tormented by dreams of the worst sort. Each night I descend into the dark cavern of dreams centred in my flapping brain-pan.

At the bottom of this terrifying cavern full of secret visions, broken mirrors and delusions, among the common refuse of life itself, I sometimes find a little diamond that presumably once belonged to a little disabled squirrel monkey. All plastered and bandaged up it tries to keep things in order a little down there. Its name has a Scandinavian ring to it -mr Nilsson- and it can sing Erbarme dich backwards unfalteringly. A useful char that knows its business.

On the whole this lost and forgotten gem looks pretty stained by the climatic circumstances in the closed interior of my solitary upper storey.

It still shines though and that is what it is all about. It is my job to carry this jewel outside safely and undamaged. Through the so-called service hatch of the neuroses of dreams it ends up in the consciousness of the bare day, the reality that is quite simple and “where everything resembles what it is”, the motto of my art.

....

June 1st, 2010

Studio, Rotterdam February 2011

Studio Rotterdam  February 2011
© Arie van Geest