exhibition:

Nulla Est Retentio

Galerie Fons Welters presents Rutger Emmelkamp

20 Jan 2007
24 Feb 2007

Rutger Emmelkamp is acutely conscious of the field of tension that generates art - and of the need for it. His work is often created out of unexpected relationships.

The artist's vocation is anything but simple - as many thinkers have observed over the centuries. You have to have a tremendous belief in yourself, besides which you need the strength to allow things to flow. Walter Benjamin even went so far, in his discussion of Charles Baudelaire, as to compare the creation of a work of art to a duel. A duel between the inner and outer world, between the eternal and the contemporary - between the artist and himself. Besides the internal conflict of creation, the artist stands face to face with the material. The form that the material takes is rarely what the artist had envisaged. In this duel, the artist's will is pitted against the will of the material.