Pinkorange meets..
Rein Kooyman
From today, your latest exhibition “This Too Shall Pass” will be on view. Can you tell us what it is about?
It is about finding peace in the environment you find yourself in, and the conscious practise of being in the moment. It feels like throughout the years we changed into a more efficiency centered society. There should be no difficulties, there are companies that deliver your goods in 10 minutes for example. It is efficient, but sometimes it feels that there is no space anymore to be retrospective.
This space is filled with moss and 3000 kilos of stones from the Ardennes. I placed it all by myself, it took me days to place and rearrange it. In a way the whole process was really meditative. It can’t fail, because there’s no right or wrong. For a lot of people it’s about the end result or a specific goal, however I think there is already success in creating an idea.
How did you start with the series?
In the first lockdown I started with painting one stone, without knowing that it would result in a series. I wanted to create a wound, a wound of the world. This is the reason that particular stone is red, painted with paprika powder. When we ended up in the first lockdown, my commercial work was canceled and no one really knew what was happening. I remember thinking: how nice would it be to spend a lot of time on something simple as painting a stone, and while doing that, reflecting on the state of the world and translating it into a positive outcome.
Making different pigments and figuring out how to implement them in nature was a process that made me really happy. For the red stone, I started mixing pigment with water from the river. While doing that, I realized I wanted to continue with that process, resulting in a variation of painted stones. Every season is represented in the series.
“This Too Shall Pass” will be on view from the 3rd of December in INDEBT STUDIO in Amsterdam.