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Peter Nijenhuis,

English A.I. translation

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The Unbearable 

Jaap Kroneman 

in Collectie De Groen

On Friday, January 17, 2020 – the day of the opening of Jaap Kroneman’s exhibition at Collectie De Groen – there was quite a lot of moisture in the air. By around five in the afternoon, the clouds had sunk toward the earth at the horizon. The great gray wall of cotton was lit red along its upper edge by the setting sun. In the twilight, the trees of Presikhaaf Park seemed as flat as a print, and the matte red bicycle path appeared glossy black. Above the Gelderland capital, a fairylike atmospheric constellation had taken shape. Somewhere inside me, a small hammer struck a fundamental note of expectation. I don’t think there could have been a better state of mind for Jaap Kroneman’s exhibition later that evening, downtown. But was that enough to take part in its meaning?

It was busy in the exhibition rooms of Collectie De Groen. In the opening remarks by Peter Jordaan—which I missed, but which could be read afterward in a free handout—Jaap Kroneman’s canvases were described as works without “representation or meaning.” That is quite a statement. How should one imagine that, and where could such a claim be grounded when it comes to the fifteen canvases on display, executed exclusively in black and white?

Procedure

The procedure behind the exhibited works seems to be deducible from the canvases themselves. Its starting point is the doodle, the kind people make during a phone call when they happen to have a pen in their hand and a piece of paper or the margin of a newspaper at hand. Kroneman makes such small motor outbursts on purpose. I once saw him doing this years ago, with full dedication in a notebook at a café, and it is said that nowadays he uses a computer for it. I assume that he selects certain doodles and then uses them as images to be transferred onto canvas. That transference cannot be seen as anything other than an artificial procedure. Judging from the pencil traces that have not been removed, the doodle’s lines are projected onto canvas and then first retraced in pencil. The lines are then converted into bands of varying widths, chosen by the artist, and filled in with even strokes of acrylic paint in the next step.*

Nowhere in the exhibited works is there any sign of handwriting or personal touch. In that respect, the works on display are consistent. You can see that they came about through an a-dynamic process of projection, tracing, and filling within the pencil lines. And yet, it is hard to shake off the illusion of movement. As if the artist himself had only just now, with one uninterrupted athletic motion, set down the tangle of lines on the canvas. The swell and restlessness awakened by this illusion of movement and fresh paint remain in the back of the mind regardless, standing in sharp contrast to the museum-like stateliness that also demands attention.

There is, moreover, more that rubs against itself and thereby calls up visual and mental tension. The doodle, highlighted here so prominently, is tied to notions of the casual, the unreasoned, the impulsive. Associations with the subconscious or the unconscious lie close at hand, yet they stand in sharp contrast to the clearly deliberate and carefully composed character of the work. The black lines—or rather, bands—almost without exception expand from or around a center and remain at a balanced distance from the edges of the canvas. This “push and pull” of what appears on the canvas operates on several more levels. Where Jaap Kroneman places evenly painted bands of different widths next to each other, a contrasting illusion of depth and spatiality emerges. You might also see the exclusive use of black and white as another matter of “push and pull,” as well as their division of roles: white as an unbounded and timeless expansion, black as its contrasting temporary event.

Whatever you want to see in it, Jaap Kroneman makes clever use of the limited means available to the visual artist. Does he do this differently in this exhibition than before? In my view, the answer is both yes and no.

Self-Improvement

After graduating from the Arnhem art academy in the early 1990s, Jaap Kroneman worked broadly. You can hardly name a visual genre that Kroneman did not take up and bend to his will with gifted nonchalance. He stood out for his nose for usually unnoticed everyday objects, materials, and designs. Detached from the ugly and chaotic reality, Kroneman gave them another existence and aura within his work. He lifted them out of their limitations and poverty.

Examples include the “dreft” letter logo with a spray-painted zigzag line across it in the exhibition Roken is heel belangrijk (Smoking is very important) in 1995 at Galerie Van Gelder in Amsterdam. In this context, one might also mention his garbage props with fluorescent light, his graphic work, and his grand piano made of mattress foam. Although his work, by his own account, often had a personal trigger, Kroneman always transcended it. His work put a finger on the general and the contemporary and nevertheless retained something timeless. Just as now, the work was consistent. If something was by Jaap Kroneman, it was always clear, and it was equally clear what he would never make. His work was striking, but not artisanal; well thought-out, but not theoretical or academic. It had to be the fruit of an unbroken exercise in taste, an aesthetic sleeplessness in which all kinds of things were dissected, only to be accepted or discarded. Kroneman’s oeuvre could not help but be underpinned by an unwritten, intuitive, and relentless program.

Because of this, one could regard Jaap Kroneman as a modernist. Remarkably, he is a modernist after the actual era of modernism, the creator of an oeuvre that, at first glance, seems to stand on its own rather than looking like a derivative or copy. What also makes Kroneman, in my eyes, a modernist is the unbearableness of his work. That unbearableness is no side issue here.

At the end of the 1950s, the head of a pastry shop in Arnhem’s Roggestraat played Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps for his young apprentice, Ad Gerritsen. Gerritsen, not yet the artist he would later become, found it a terrible racket. And you could hardly say he was wrong. He still had to grow into it. Significant modernist art is not pleasant to listen to or to look at. Behind it lies not only a provocative but also a functional intention. Just as the artist—who is not born a modernist but must reach beyond himself to become one—so must the viewer or listener change themselves and become someone with better and more consistent taste.

How that should happen, how this “other person” should be filled in, and whether it is even possible, remains to this day largely a mystery and a recipe for disappointments. But however it may be, the task is there—and why shouldn’t one surrender to it?

Narrowing

Over time, Jaap Kroneman’s artistry has become increasingly consistent and refined. In his practice, you can speak of narrowing: over the years, the number of options available to him has steadily decreased, while his application of these choices has gained in strength. The question is: how does this look?

At the exhibition at Collectie De Groen, alongside the fifteen canvases, there were also four other works. To the left of the stairs leading to the first floor, one encountered a narrow, perfectly straight pipe with a small clamp-like protrusion at eye level. This was the work Drinking Straw (1991), on loan from the Akzo Nobel collection. It is a good work to have here. Just as in the canvases upstairs, it expresses a highly stylized form. Without much imagination, one could read the piece as a parody of the high-pressure aesthetics of the 1980s.

A similar aesthetic was visible in the portraits of Prince Claus (Drawing I, 1995, and Drawing II, 1995, also from the Akzo Nobel collection). They were included here because they are part of the history of Dutch portraiture and because they belong to Kroneman’s oeuvre. But the effect of their presence was somewhat disruptive: unlike the canvases upstairs, these works are carried by specific cultural-historical references.

On the top floor, in addition to the canvases, there was a work from the collection of Rob and Mariët Collectie De Groen: a white, elongated, smooth, triangular wooden form that leaned against the wall. To my mind, it was related to Kroneman’s earlier work with everyday objects. It called to mind a coat rack, or perhaps a minimalist surfboard. It also reminded me of Gerrit Rietveld’s designs, stripped of function and reduced to abstract form.

But the main body of the exhibition remained the fifteen canvases. Their consistency, their refusal to offer any kind of anecdotal content, and their unrelenting demand for attention placed the visitor in a confrontation with what Kroneman has been honing over the years: a limited, sharpened, almost unbearable vocabulary.

The Unbearableness

This brings us back to the remark in the opening speech: “without representation or meaning.” It seems to me that this refers to the lack of anecdotal content in the works. Indeed, there is nothing depicted on these canvases—no portraits, no landscapes, no interiors, no recognizable reality. Nor is there a story hidden in the work, no symbolism, no allegory. The canvases are what they are: black-and-white compositions of lines, bands, forms.

And yet, “without meaning” is too hastily said. After all, meaning arises as soon as there is perception. The canvases themselves contain countless points of entry. Their size, their spatial presence, the precision of their execution, the relationship between black and white, the dynamics and rhythm of the compositions—all these elements offer the viewer a wealth of associations and interpretations.

But what they emphatically do not offer is comfort. There is nothing here that lets you sit back satisfied, nothing that provides narrative grip, nothing that gives the illusion of harmony or conclusion. The canvases keep pushing you away while simultaneously pulling you in. That is their unbearableness.

This is why I consider Jaap Kroneman a modernist: not because his work copies modernist forms, but because it forces the viewer to change themselves, to become another person, to develop a sharper and more consistent sense of form and taste. The canvases are exercises in attention, in endurance, in openness to what is there and nothing more.

Seen this way, the unbearable quality of the works is not a flaw, but their core strength. The stork may or may not come, but Kroneman has built the pole and the wheel with absolute dedication.

Closing Reflections

Jaap Kroneman has always resisted the temptation to make his work easier, more accessible, or more pleasing. His oeuvre shows a steady stripping away, a narrowing that is not impoverishment but intensification. He has, over the years, created for himself a field of action that is both extremely limited and extremely demanding—both for himself and for the viewer.

In that sense, his work is not only modernist but also ethical. It resists compromise. It rejects the anecdotal, the decorative, the entertaining. It demands seriousness, precision, and patience. It calls upon the viewer to rise above themselves, to endure the lack of comfort, to accept the confrontation with what at first seems barren and empty but, on closer inspection, proves inexhaustibly rich.

This, I think, is the “content” my teachers once spoke of in art school. Not content as a message, a story, or a moral lesson, but content as intrinsic necessity: the stubborn insistence that a work of art be what it must be, regardless of whether it pleases.

And that is why Jaap Kroneman is unbearable. But unbearable in the only way that matters: he makes us face the limits of our own perception and taste, and he challenges us to move beyond them.