Henriëtte van 't Hoog is exhibiting at the Mondrian House as part of 'Equilibrium'. For this exhibition, the Amsterdam-based artist drew inspiration from Piet Mondrian's quest for balance.
In this interview by Ine Dammers Henriëtte discusses her work, motivations and exhibition Equilibrium, in which she exhibits together with Elise van der Linden.
You've been making corner and wall paintings for a long time, what's exciting about that?
A corner painting is an enigma. I have a whole series titled Spandrel (corner piece) designed for very different spaces. Colour, shape and relationship to the space are always slightly different. In the design on the flat surface, I put a number of parallel lines that together form three quadrangles. In the architectural space, through division and colour, the quadrangles look like multiple triangles, and one of the quadrangles seems to flip over. If you walk past the work, or choose a different vantage point, the image you see changes. This has a very disruptive effect: your spatial estimation is subverted.
Creating a painting in an existing architectural space is very challenging. I can put my form language into it differently all the time. In some locations, you can let the shapes continue across the ceiling and floor, which is what I did in RC De Ruimte in IJmuiden, for example. The location in the Mondrian House is a given, the wall is opposite the ticket office and you walk past it when you go to the exhibition. For the design, I use the residual shapes of previous murals; you can't invent such shapes. I make choices, combine and consciously work with repetition, parallelism, dissonance, variations. These are elements from music, I listen to music a lot, which I use in a visual sense. This new mural is a continuation of the works titled Equilibrium. In this, I assume equality: there is no before and no after. Equivalence is an element present in all my work. Even in the still lifes I used to paint, I thought foreground and background were of equal value.
Does your work connect to Mondrian's work?
I didn't think about Mondrian at all when designing. I love his work, both the landscapes in his early period and the late period with the really abstract works. I find his self-selected system of rectangular shapes and black lines very inspiring. My development does have a parallel with Mondrian's. I started as an old-fashioned still-life painter and needed those objects for a very long time, but eventually I switched to abstract forms separate from objects. But there are big differences: I don't use right angles of 90 degrees, but all kinds of polygons that are not really geometric. I have nothing to do with Mondrian's ideas about universal language and harmony. I am not looking for truth and purity. Mondrian wanted to reform the world, I have no message about that. I have no message, no content, but neither is it meant as decoration. I like the meaningless side of it. I am out to pull the wool over your eyes, to take you off your mundane wits. Through my bullshit stuff, a viewer can refresh and rearrange his perception
Do you work a lot with perspective distortion and optical deception?
This is especially true of the smaller wall objects. The first series I made consists of zinc objects with an open shape, painted on both sides. In these, I work with simple geometric shapes derived from the cube, but with no describable geometric logic. The faces of the cube are stretched, cut off and set at a faint angle in relation to each other. These shapes lend themselves extremely well to perspective distortion and illusion; the eye is an easily deceived sense. Playing with perspective illusions makes you not understand what you see and how you see it. This is intensified to a fierce degree by colour. What you perceive is not stable: the shapes flip over, one time it is an open, three steps further a closed shape. The colours affect the forms and vice versa, but I don't deal with that consciously, I'm a doer. Interview continues below image.
Henriette van 't Hoog in front of her designed mural in the entrance of the Mondrian House (Photo: Peter Putters / De Nozem Photography).
For years at the academy, I taught what I call not thinking, not programming, but looking. I don't want spotlights or bright lighting on my work: that creates shadows. Shadows are an extra form I didn't ask for. The lighting should be such that there are as few shadows as possible. The shape is most important, so if you mess with the shape, it's ruined. The colours are no less important than the shape. Colours are incredibly powerful tools. They go their own way, things really do happen that you can't foresee. The reflex paint on the back of the wall object has an enormous effect: the object seems to float in a glow of colour, and something that has no concrete form becomes visible on the wall. You are still amazed every time what happens under your hands.
You call yourself a colourist, what do you mean by that?
That I think in colours and in sounds. A colourist is someone who is extremely sensitive to colour nuances, I am endlessly searching for colours that resonate with each other. Every colour has its own energy and weight. A yellow-green next to a purple or cyclamen red next to green-yellow and lilac, complementary in hue but equal in tone. The colours I use come from my collection of coloured paper, which is my palette. But it's always quite a search there are always several layers of paint, it's almost never right in one go.
Do you use some kind of system to make your work?
There are some fixed givens, constraints that I have imposed on myself: A kind of cube-shape is always the starting point. The limitation to that one shape yields a lot of possibilities. To give an example: in the series 'thickened quadrangles', my starting point is the repetition of the shape of the side on the front. From this starting point, new forms constantly develop: the work generates itself, i.e. one work emerges from the other. The work sets its own direction. Restrictions create freedom, but you always have to break rules: you set them up to create a playing field, they are not laws. I do always have to surprise myself, discover what is possible in terms of impossibilities. I am both serious and not serious. If I don't like it, I don't make it. I have appointed myself a visual artist. Then anything has to happen, coincidence is a lucky thing.
Wall objects by Henriette van 't Hoog at the Mondrian House (Photo: Peter Putters / De Nozem Photography).
How do you hang the wall objects?
In my studio, it hangs close together all over the wall for lack of storage. But in another room, I hang it where the object best catches the light. You then think: I see this, but that turns out not to be the case. I play with expectations. If you hang things differently they show themselves differently. There is changeability, a reacting to the environment, to the light, to the viewer moving. Of course, reflex colours do look different from above than from below. It doesn't have to hang at eye level from me, deviating from the ordinary usually produces exciting things.
The shape remains the same, but what you see is always different, is the same true of the floor objects?
I think so. The work titled Soul Light is the most recent. It has that absurdity, people call it 'the crocodile', you don't know anything about it, me neither. Coloured light shines through the slits in the articulated shape that spins across the floor. They are very strange shapes, but they are still borrowed from the cube. The light radiating from inside to outside changes from pink to green. Light is a new element in my work, it is a continuation of that glow of colour on the wall.