When we want to articulate in-depth positions and get a ducking while we’re at it, the dynamic integrity of solitary isolation comes in conflict with the levelling status at the surface.
Curator, art critic and poet Freek Lomme and artist Joan van Barneveld feel the urge to leap. At the same time they are afraid of the deep. They want to leave but they also hope to return home safely.
Sketching as linguistic and visual creatures, they fathom the depth at the horizon of experience. With his poems – ‘short pieces of text’ – Lomme seeks to balance the humanistic challenge inherent of the modern armamentarium of language with an urge for intense ‘doings and dealings’. Van Barneveld’s artworks present places where we could get a dip: representations of our desire for profundity; imaginable locations where we can project handles for profound retreats.
This book is a report of their leap in the deep end. A shared tribute to the need to find a place amidst transition and to get lost while seeking the way. Lomme’s poems evolved between 2008 and 2014, often on the road, in a period when his radius of action shifted from that of a local dreamer to that of a global cultural worker. Likewise, the sketches by Van Barneveld can be understood as a localised report of a coming-of-age. They are silkscreens of photos made in Los Angeles and raw images serving as sources for new works: they localise and release profundity, specifically in the finalised works. During an exhibition of Joan van Barneveld at art space Onomatopee, run by Freek Lomme, they recognised each other in their respective movements and centres, and decided to combine this raw source material with the unpublished poems.
What this illustrated collection of poems brings to the surface is the palpable energy of their leap, their search for a profound, honest position in an expanding world. What connects them is their dedication to that depth, where they both take inspiration from Punk’s rough edges and the free arts’ applicable potential to articulate indeterminate spaces: ‘hard cores in hard-hearted chords’.
‘Rock on’
26 images by Joan van Barneveld
hard cores in hard-hearted chords
Poems by Freek Lomme with images by Joan van Barneveld
Graphic design by Eric de Haas
