Azul bahia (blue Brazilian granite), grey granite, quartzite and marble: a number of individual slabs of stone placed throughout the space make up, along with a series of pencil drawings, the installation by Marc Oosting.
The title of Marc Oosting’s presentation, What’s up, habit?, plays on the idea that the origins of an image have everything to do with its support, be it a rock wall or a field of digital pixels, which allows the image to be manifest. The support is, in fact, the access code to the image’s identity as well as its meaning. This exhibition revolves around the issue as to how radically, with regard to the perception of images, existing conventions can be undermined.
One of the works is titled Cloud. It consists of a large slab of extremely hard quartzite, onto which a rectangle containing the word ‘Cloud’ has been silkscreened. The letters of the word ‘Cloud’ have a strange, distorted look and seem to hover in a spatial void. The word resembles a verification code (CAPTCHA) that sometimes needs to be typed in when we request a new password on the computer. Should this ‘need to identify’ actually be met, Oosting’s airy cloud would prove to be a leaden one. The cloud-like appearance of the polished stone cannot counteract the gravity which is intrinsic to the object. The elegant, florid letters dissolve in the two-dimensional and seek a sense of volume by way of the word’s meaning. This is how Marc Oosting renders visibility to the clash between a material and more abstract, immaterial world, but also to that between intuitive and cognitive knowledge, between time and timelessness, between different (or shifting) dimensions. Though the material and the depiction may not be compatible, together they do form a portrayal of the effects of time. The drawings, each involving three versions of the same haiku written in pencil, also reflect on the notion of time; but here this relates to a linear process that ultimately leads to a dialogue of form, content and sound.
The work of Marc Oosting can be seen in the context of a current tendency to combine classical formal and connotative issues with a free use of materials and an experimentation with a range of conceptual approaches.
Marc Oosting (1975, Dronten, NL) lives and works in Amsterdam. From 2011 to 2013 he has been a resident at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten. In 2006 Oosting was nominated for the Koninklijke Prijs voor Schilderkunst (Royal Award for Painting), and in 2009 for the long list of the Prix de Rome. During that same year he was granted the KPN Kunstprix. His work is represented in various private and(semi)public collections.