Job Koelewijn: Higher Contradictions

In Job Koelewijn’s sixth solo exhibition at Galerie Fons Welters the walls are filled with contradictions. The words “Be More Specific” motivated a new series of monumental wall drawings, reminding of an eponymous work from 2006, for which Koelewijn printed this text on the wall with a large wooden stamp in green inhalation ointment. Wondering what would be its antithesis, he returned to this statement to arrive at an overview in which contradictions feel more complete together. In a special invitation card these incentives serve as a mould for the exhibition.

Text, in the broadest sense of the word, has always taken an important place within Koelewijn’s work. In the last years, stemming from his “Ongoing reading project”, literature appeared mainly in large drawings as aphorisms; short theses as “style is self-plagiarism” or “vision is the art of seeing things invisible”, which are, on closer inspection, harder to grasp than they appear at first sight. This time Koelewijn literally departs from duality, continuing on the gallery walls with citations like “opposition is true friendship” and “nothing fails like success”. “The idea of polarity is an important aspect of my work, and the more you think about it, the more fundamental and penetrative this becomes: day/night, high/low, hot/cold; notions that balance each other out.” Instead of being played off against each other, the textual oppositions in “Higher Contradictions” are balanced, provoking new insights.