Jeroen Verhoeven. The Curious Image

LONDON DERING STREET

The Curious Image, the first solo exhibition in the UK by the celebrated Dutch artist and designer Jeroen Verhoeven, will be shown at Blain|Southern London in May.

The central work of the exhibition is Lectori Salutem, a monumental creation made from highly polished steel. While ostensibly a desk, its flowing contours and reflective surfaces play smoke and mirrors with the eye; from some aspects it looks like a terrifying machine, from others a vision of sublime beauty. Like Verhoeven’s earlier Cinderella Table, which is now in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and MoMA, New York, the work combines highly skilled craftsmanship with complex industrial processes. One side of the desk seems to have been spliced in two, exposing the beauty of the engineering within. In a further twist, when the work is viewed from certain angles, two silhouettes can be seen, depicting Verhoeven’s twin brother Joep and Judith de Graauw, who work alongside him to form the Dutch design house Demakersvan.

Lectori Salutem thus tells the story of its own creation, allowing the viewer an insight into the physical construction of the work, as well as providing a highly personal link with its makers. Verhoeven sees this as an essential element of Demakersvan’s output: “We are storytellers, from fantasy to factory, from statement to product”.

In contrast to the solidity of the desk, Verhoeven’s chandelier, Virtue of Blue, is a delicate construction featuring 500 solar panels cut into the shapes of four different breeds of butterfly. These cluster around a flame-like, hand-blown glass bulb and, though they are static, appear in flight. Another remarkable element of the chandelier is that it is self-sustaining; like real butterflies, which use the rays of the sun to raise their own body temperatures, the wings of the chandelier butterflies absorb energy during daylight hours to provide power for the light they surround.

The final work, Centerflow, is a pair of music speakers in the form of petals fashioned from rosewood. These were fabricated with the same layering technique used in the creation of violins - a violin maker was on site during the manufacturing process - combining this age-old craft with contemporary production techniques, a hallmark of Verhoeven’s practice.