Barbara Seiler

In former series Sander van Deurzen concerned timeless theme’s like, power, the fugitive, eroticism, tragic and humor. He tilted these theme’s which were used over and over in art-history to the present and therewith made them relevant again. Now in these new body of works many elements from former series come together in new combinations. Figurative and abstract go together. They show up and/or disappear at the same time. As if everything is fluid, and changing all the time. In one painting one can see a ball, in the other painting the ball becomes an eyeball. He plays with the way we look at his paintings, we cannot pinpoint them in a certain style or movement. Time-based terms like progressive and it’s opposite, reactionary, avant- and arrieregarde are of little use to describe his atemporal work. In this time frame full (art) historical references, van Deurzen takes what he wants to make his point. Without guilt and without an agenda based on a received meaning of a style. By internet, we have everything available and we can just use what’s there and around, but not feel concerned by it. The transfer of styles, of motifs, of ideas, from a historical context to the present one does not reinforce their obsolescence. In fact the opposite occurs, in the atemporal present, they are resurrected and made newly relevant.
This fit’s his way of using many references. His use of art-historical references, is one of the reasons to start painting after leaving the academy. Another reason is the very broad notion of a network of possibilities that stretches horizontally across time periods. We can picture the eternal present as an endlessly flat surface with vistas in every direction, not unlike the surface of a painting. He always looked to art history for inspiration, but the immediate and hugely expanded catalogue of visual information offered by the internet has radically altered his relationship to the history of art and caused a redirection of artistic inquiry from strictly forward moving into a kind of super branched-out questioning. It is closest to a connoisseurship of boundless information, a picking and choosing of elements of the past to resolve a problem or a task at hand. In his work the absence of stylistic markers indicate the demise of a common culture, a deeply troubling development , which at the best implies cultural status , and at worst cultural surrender. ‘We live in a post era without forms of it’s own powerful enough to brand the times, ‘ lamented the writer Douglas Copland in an article in which he introduced literary atemporality.
Pop-music critic Simon Reynolds, described contemporary pop-music in the aughties, also sees the erosion of era-defining genres as an intellectual dead end. Simon Reynolds; ‘We’re quite deep into a phase of anything goes, guiltless appropriation, a free-for-all of asset-stripping that ranges all over the globe and all across the span of human history.’ Both Copland and Reynolds observations reveal an acute nostalgia for a time when things were new and deep mourning for the missing propulsive shot of energy that attended an act of what could be interpreted as cultural progression. But what if, as in William Gibson’s original formulation, atemporality was considered as a strategy of resistance, a way of ‘opting out of the industrialization of novely’ the syndrome of growth and expansion at any costs? What if abstaining from new aesthetic forms meant gaining new ways of understanding the use of form P18. The use of references and styles is not only seen in contemporary art. Fashion design, music and furniture design.