ROUGE ROYAL

STANS VRIJSEN & SOFIA BOUBOLIS

SPAREWHEEL










Sparewheel is about to close, and it is surely a coincidence that the current object on display is so automobile-like. Prominent and impressive to the passers-by, it takes up just the amount of space as a charming coupe-style vehicle would. As you inspect it from the rear, front and sides, you find yourself stroking and poking it with a testing finger. The feel of the surface tempts you into a disturbing thought of perhaps wanting to become an owner of such a vehicle one day. It is clearly a second hand, what a relief: someone has already inscribed on its sides a terrible truth about Jonas. Despite not smelling very well at the time (Jonas Stinkt), he was also just one letter away from being a saint and is probably a fragrant adult now. The price is getting friendlier too - some little girls have tempered the pointy rear with stickers! At the sight of this vandalism the acquisitive instinct loosens its grip somehow. The primitive worry that someone else drives away to Wallonia fades: obviously, this object has no wheels. Instead, you see visitors circling around it, rather non-menacing. Besides, it is lovely to have the Cooper stationary as it is, accessible to many. A thoughtful citizen that you are is back.

It is a big stone in the middle of the room, and a rare case of gigantism in art production that isn’t annoying. Perhaps because the gigantism it is not: the original object just happens to be big. We do face the evidence of an intelligent transportation process. The details of the patterns from a chunk of red marble in its natural environment have been reproduced with the newly acquired skills of two people. A twist that takes us further from the decorative arts is that this is not an imitation of a chic environment, but of a source material itself. Brute as it is, it is a carefully crafted copy of a stone sitting in a stone pit while its lightweight twin does the ambassador job on sight.

Admirers of Doris Lessing can indulge in a little levity here too. The depressing and slightly snobbish notion of the boulder-pushers that the author proposes in her novel The Golden Notebooks, associated with the heavy and mundane work of those who bring pieces of enlightenment on the mountain of stupidity, is smiled at with a healthy cheek. It turns out that it is possible to push lighter stuff, and in a different way, perhaps even to occasionally forget about the theory of micro-action, which in its hopelessness rhymes with the boulder-pusher’s former tough luck. To not get dragged into a discussion on the superficially floating original and fake, let’s say, the new modes of transportation are essential here, rather than the former. Who else but good craftswomen with a previous art education to inform us of the alternative non-sisyphus ways.





Polina Akhmetzyanova