aboutMarcus 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.”
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