Between disciplining and trust lies a field of particular interest for our present situation: it entails the continuation of modernity’s materialisation whilst we know that we have never really been modern. It is a playfield in which we are being both pushed and pulled. A sensory sphere and a sensible framework seem to crash into each other within
the arena of our lives; like a black hole where the equation remains a status-quo of relations whilst architecture is rising up amongst us, creating ever more peepholes for unknown lenses.
The work of Van Pinxteren is exceptional in this regard, that it stages such situations as an on-going dialogue in which an object of concern enters a grey area where it fosters deeper negotiating. The perspective of the director and directed can change sides here as the flow of power may be ruled by a single paradigm yet confused by those who did not read the rules and regulations. The ensuing interaction reads much like a Hegelian master-servant dialectic manifesting itself within a cultural sphere rather than in the social-economic realm, reaching for a relational configuration along its more profound experience.
This art challenges the set’s determinants – the relations of subject, object and architecture – by calling upon the power of our sensory system to activate and open up that which seems morally subversive and counter-rational when related to as fragile currents of the rational itself.
Van Pinxteren’s LOGO is a holistic symbolic sum, as a logo should be, but at the same time it allows for a visual reading that may alter. The ovals can be read optically as a circle of lenses surrounding the viewer or closing their lines inward in front of him. The frame surrounding these focuses creates a block that is either excluding or including; a blueprint for a less symbolic and truly spatial architecture.
In her work, the visual motive of the oval often returns in various formats for and of dialogue in which our points of view are being captured and we capture the attention of another focus as we move in its direction.
This work deals with a society of trust in an era of sensory control and asks us to position ourselves. As we open up to the fragility of being, getting close, she promotes the ethical potential of the aesthetic experience as a humanising force.
Karin van Pinxteren 