Artist website: Motoi Yamamoto

Meter-high heads in baroque style, men with streaming locks and women with expressive faces, scattered around as fragments in space. They evoke associations of a battle having been fought between the gods and the titans, the remains of which have now become visible.

The work shows a conflict, an inner battle, but also the result of aggression; figures are tied together, they seem to be startled, sometimes wounded, and we occasionally see fragments of bodies indicating that the battle can also be fought at the level of life and death.

With Javier Marín, art is emotion, an emotion that balances on the edge of the shocking reality of today full of fear and horror on one hand and a world of ideal beauty on the other, the edge between the vigour of youth and the decline of old-age.

Website: www.javiermarin.com

The street where I live used to be quite a boring street until Florentijn Hofman decided to do something about that. He applied a layer of only 2 micron of blue paint onto one of the most unseen blocks of houses in my street and it became Rotterdam’s most photographed one. His redecorating made people start looking again at what was and maybe even think about what they will get in return.

Florentijn Hofman is not an average gallery-exhibited artist. The world is a playground and he likes to play. A giant rubber duck, too big to fit into anyone’s bath and impossible to ignore, floating in the Loire river in France, a 12 meter tall thatched musk rat reclining against a life-sized cottage and his latest: super sized stuffed animals.. All integrating, intriguing and interactive installations. To amaze and make life more fun.

*The blue houses in my street are unfortunately demolished, my street is now boring again.

Website: www.florentijnhofman.nl

I mentioned it before but for those of you who are new here, I grew up near he beach. During the summer it is a crowded  place with playing kids, ice cream and all other kinds of  summer recreations. But off-season the beach is empty and that’s when I like it the most.

Then it can happen that during a walk you meet the Beach Animals. Large creatures walking all by themselves on the wet sand. Made out of simple electricity tube and tie wraps and still manage to look poetic.

The energy they need to walk is coming from stored wind in plastic bottles and with a very simple primary brain and sensors (remember we are still talking about electricity tubes and tie wraps here) they can make decisions about their destination so they can survive on the beach. They won’t walk into the sea or get stuck into the loose sand.

On the coastline they collect the sand that washes ashore and move it to the dunes. It is their contribution to keep our coast intact.

With his rare logical insights and technical skills Theo Jansen is the inventor of a complete new evolution theory. His target is to create a new autonomous life form and I already have fallen in love with them

Theo Jansen’s Creatures from Datamouth on Vimeo.

There is a little bakery near my house and behind the counter stands an iron basket filled with eggs. Every time I’m in this bakery I imagine how the shop owner, a big guy with big hands, is putting the eggs in the basket. It seems such an easy task but it’s not. He really has to be focused on his actions because these fragile eggs could so easily break if you place them wrong.

So what is this guy thinking about when performing this daily routine. I could ask but then I’m afraid he would tell me about unpaid bills or his boring wife and the magic would be gone. So I rather fill in his thoughts myself: Which came first, the chicken or the egg.

In 2000 Koen Vanmechelen launched his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project and started crossing breeds of different chicken from different countries with the aim of eventually returning to “the original chicken” This intervention not only occurred in chicken coops and cages but also in his artistic creations when he “crosses” chicken specimens with other animals, like eagles or artificial materials like glass.

This crossbred touches a lot of contemporary social issues such as genetic manipulation, cloning and globalisation, but also tackles fundamental questions about humanity. What is life? What is our identity as a species and as an individual?

Agnes Husslein explained it beautifully: “The egg is the perfect metaphor. It represents fertility, the beginning, but it also signifies a confined but formally ideal space, a wonderful cage that will break open, and out of which something new will be created and nobody knows exactly what. In the ongoing cycle of fertilizing and being fertilized, liberating and being domesticated, the egg at the beginning is the ultimate cage”

Note: all the chickens in this project are taken really good care off. In contradiction to most of the chicken or eggs we buy in our supermarkets

Website: www.koenvanmechelen.be

Seemingly innocent children toys act as a kind of space invaders emerging from a world hidden inside our childhood memories. Here they invade antique Chinese furniture, threatening their traditional past. These toys reveal a surreal and terrifying landscape of derailed trains, drowning babies, crashing planes and wild dinosaurs. They make me question my self-constructed environments, shake up my make-believe worlds and throw them off centre. Out of the confusion a far more powerful world develops, beyond the clarity of logic.

Inside the chaos there is often another unexplored world, offering new possibilities in sense making.

The work of Wokmedia is primarily concerned with the emotional experience, an archetypal memory or a physical sensation. Often they survey the state in-between: where structure emerges from chaos and confusion is beginning to make sense. Out of devastation and destruction they create a new world. A world imbedded in their childhood memories when emotions were not expected to be filtered, when make-believe was not equated with lunacy.

Website: www.wokmedia.com

Grandma would turn around in her grave if she discovered what happened to her beloved collection. To me it’s like I’m finally allowed to play with it.

They still look so innocent and sweet but don’t get fooled, these figurines adapted actually quite well in the “real world”. All human weaknesses appear in Barnaby Barfords group settings, they can be mean, greedy or conceited and give you that twisted feeling when instant likeability turns into an imperfect dark place.

The good, The Bad The Belle, till april 5 2009 Springobjects, Londen

And off course there is a tragic lovestory, Barfords first film, which explores high and low culture and question the notions of traditional value within ceramics.

Source: Barnaby Barford

New works by Hans van Bentem coming up. Here’s early stage still in China.

source: Hans van Bentem (himself)