Jonathan van Doornum

My visual work consists mainly sculptures and installations. These arise from a variety of positions and are built up from different materials and techniques. I’m searching for the relation between functionality and emotion. I like to use this formalist approach in order to create space and encouragement for mysticism and expression. Therefore contradictions occur frequently in my work.

In many of my sculptures a transition appears. Everyday objects and materials transform into new and elusive forms. Along with this, I’m not only researching the concept of time but also the feeling of it.

My works are built up as paintings. Layer by layer, form and content are added. Cultural and historical references are interspersed with interior elements. A key aspect of my work is the coherence within the sculpture itself. Therefore spatiality and craftsmanship are matters of great importance to me.

Marcus Lütkemeyer, curator Schloss Ringenberg:

“Jonathan van Doornum works as a sculptor by extension. Although on a first glance his artworks  might remind of fragments of well known figurations, nameable motives or could occur as even more alluring  or sometimes also ‘inscrutable’ objects  it is less about giving a shape to a visible ‘thing’ than shaping an almost abstract process of materialization into an image. This paradoxical issue, first of  all, depends on the material itself – because what he uses to be forced into form already is artificial in itself: cheap compressed wood and wood-like mixtures. Nothing is as it appears – a general  philosophical term, however in case of Jonathan van Doornum without hiding the key of a more sensual generating of knowledge that put stock in the range of opportunities of individual perception. Somehow the pieces of Jonathan van Doornum are similar to sublime objects, precisely this kind of bject that is raised to the dignity of ‘thing’: An ordinary, everyday object that undergoes an act of transubstantiation. For this reason, the sublime  object features the paradox of an object that can exist only in the shade, in an intermediate, half-born state, as something latent. Or even simpler: It is like a squid that is a highly effective and sonsy creature inside the water, however outside it is only a lump of slime. In regard to the sublime objects, if we try to eliminate the shadows in order to obtain the substance as soon as it comes fully to light (out of the water), it dissolves, and all that remains in our hands is the slime of a burst bubble – the material granulates back to its ingredients and nothing else.”