The False Poetry of Cutting and Pasting
by Femke Vandenbosch
“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable,” said American artist Robert Rauschenberg. When you are lucky enough to wade through Hilde Overbergh’s universe, you immediately understand what he means by that. Recognizable, insignificant objects and materials have been assimilated by her into striking installations. Visual textures that provide a perfectly dosed, hardcore view of the debris of our contemporary society. When asked about her color palette — which sometimes consists of soft pastels, but also doesn’t shy away from fluorescent colors — she indicates to love all colors. Overbergh has a talent for finding beauty in everyday objects. The celebration of everything that belongs to our industrialized mass culture was the domain of pop art. Mass-produced products, trivial consumer objects, and all other reproducible commodities have been accepted as motifs from this art movement onwards. Although Overbergh’s artworks stand close to life in a similar manner, they are even more closely related to contemporary waste culture than to mass culture. She starts from the abandoned and rejected remains of items, and left-over building materials from waste containers and construction sites — the debris and junk that the rampant positivism of mass consumption has inevitably spawned. However, her industrial vocabulary is not an ecological point of view. To understand her visual language, it is important to know what her journey has been.
At the age of nineteen Overbergh traveled to San Francisco (USA). In those days the abandoned and derelict Hamms brewery had grown to be a legendary place known as The Vats. In and around the old barrels, the local punk scene lived, rehearsed and flourished. The energy and freedom the artist experienced over there intrigued her, and left a lasting impression. And it wasn’t the destruction and decay that remained important to her artistic evolution up until today, but rather the potential for reconstruction and liberation.
Overbergh collects rope, pipes, cloths, mattresses, corrugated sheets, cardboard, Plexiglas, glass, and whatever else catches her eye, and takes it home. She continues this scavenger hunt in her studio through magazines, books, and art history. The modus operandi of collecting is the first artistic act of her process. And this could be anywhere: along the beach or at an industrial site. The act of gathering is more important than the location where the gathering happens, and in a way even more important than what it is that she collects exactly. The artist describes this as a casual, open action, and the choices she makes as intuitive. “To pick something up or not is a spontaneous reaction I have to things around me. What do I pick up, what do I leave? It’s instinctive, it soothes me. It is a version of meditation.” Meditation is a way to find silence. In mindfulness, an associated form of meditation, it is all about being consciously present in the moment without judging. It's not about change, but about accepting things as they are. It is a state of consciousness that allows Overbergh to collect matter based on looks, patterns, and tactility in a sensory and sensitive manner. Her collectibles are the raw material with which she surrounds herself in her studio. The result is a treasure trove of color, texture, and shape. This approach is akin to the set-up of a mood board, which fashion designers often use to visualize an idea, a concept, thought, or feeling. Her studio could be perceived as a mood board in itself. But Overbergh is not looking for emotion or poetry. It is here where false poetry seeps into her art. What activates her unintentionally to choose something is expressed in the finished artwork as a feeling of affect. The act of finding and taking home for keepsake evokes a moving interpretation of nurturing and preserving. This is only strengthened by the nature of the matter, which is generally regarded as waste. Yet her motive is purely compositional. Her visual language is abstract. It is the direct object that appeals to her, literally: it is what it is.
Overbergh's journey of discovery and creation doesn’t stop at the objet trouvé or the readymade. On the contrary, as previously stated, it is not destruction but construction that fascinates her. The act of gathering is just a warm-up exercise. The artist starts from a blank page in her studio. She creates a new coherence very consciously. It is a process of organizing and arranging. She slides and moves, adds and removes. It is a compositional exercise in search of the right tension between the different fragments. The surrealists, with important representatives such as René Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Max Ernst, came up with absurd scenes through enigmatic combinations of objects. They also let (sub)consciousness play a role during. Overbergh's imagery is related to this system. She allows herself to be guided by various objects, and masters the game of transparency, augmentation, and reduction. She gives shape to a similar suspense through draped fabric and textures of materials such as wood and stone. The presence of a giant circle in one of her works can, for example, indicate that she had found the screw cap of a bottle. Because matter is not sacred. Overbergh intervenes purposefully with scissors, a saw, paint, or needle and thread. Her painterly interventions and impressive sense of color reveal the roots she has in the more traditional arts. She cites Sigmar Polke’s versatility and passion for experimentation, Helen Frankenthaler’s color field paintings, and Ellsworth Kelly’s “hard edges” as important references. “Collage is the twentieth century’s greatest invention,” is what their colleague Robert Motherwell said about this visual art form that arose at the end of the previous century, and that owes its name to the French verb coller, which means “to paste” or “to glue”. It is an act of isolating, and bringing different elements together again. Connotations are cut away and glued together. The material object is stripped of language and meaning, and reduced to a new vocabulary that is limited to appearance. This process of reconstruction and editing, selection, and exclusion is the core of Overbergh’s oeuvre. It is about a feeling for assembling, and a knack for how different components relate to each other: a sensitivity to connection. It couldn't be more beautifully put than Swedish musician Jens Lekman has: “The beauty of collage technique is that you’re using sounds that have never met and were never supposed to meet. You introduce them to each other, at first they’re a bit shy, clumsy, staring at their shoes. But you can sense there’s something there. So you cut and paste a little bit and by the end of the song you can spot them in the corner, holding hands.” This idea of creating tension through entering new and remarkable relations is something the artist also applies when choosing titles for works such as: Accomodating the Mess; Dietro il Dipinto; I’m Feeling Ok but I Don’t Know Where I Am; Sassy Talks and Crazy Lives; La Couleur Jaune pour le Petit Déjeuner; Finding the Balance en Why Hack a Path Trough a Jungle When There is a Clear Road in the Same Direction? These titles come to be in a similar way to how the artworks develop, and are an integral part of it. The dramatic tension is purposefully constructed between the words of the titles, as well as between the words and the image. Using this adventurous literary technique of cutting up and rearranging text started with the Dadaists, and is called “cut-up” or “découpé”. Sometimes the titles hint at the presence of a source through the use of quotation marks: “… and before she knew it, she was disoriented” or “Somehow He Misread The Instructions”. You don’t know whether the source is a book, a magazine, or a statement overheard and saved by the artist. But she also refers to art history, as is the case with the work titled Magritte’s “aircastle” painted blue, or purely to the invisible like with painted rope. A playful layering of surprise, humor, and irony are inherent to this artistic approach. It is within the construction of a mutual relationship that the unexpected arises.
Overbergh goes beyond found fragments and words, and their mutual relation. She also involves negative space, and what is not said or present in her creative process. The tension build-up arises from the connection between each part separately and together, and the present space. She builds in an architectural way in relation to the surroundings, and even lets the artworks play a part in relation to each other. Creation literally takes place in and with the space. In this way, works of art can change shape both in situ and through their mutual dialogue. Empty space forms patterns, and evokes a sense of figuration. What isn’t there is just as important as what is. The static becomes fluid, and shows potential for (other) possibilities. By treating space as a fragment of the collage, the artworks continue to live and transform. The artist is aware of the endless potential to let everything around us become a collage. She possesses tremendous freedom throughout the process, and explosive energy in the execution, combined with a remarkable sense for balance. Collage is more than a technique. It’s an act. And in Overbergh’s case it is not an innocent act. She encourages us to perpetually re-examine how the world is perceived. The artist takes up the challenge, and questions conventions and semantics. “A battlefield of cultural constructs and meaning” (Blanca Ortiga) is what they sometimes call modern collage. Welcome to the arena of Hilde Overbergh.