EN
Erasmus Gallery Rotterdam
Anuli Croon solo
8 November 2021 — 1 April 2022
Opening speech Siebe Thissen, 11 November 2021
Dear guests, Anuli,
I am delighted to be saying a few words to open this exhibition. For nearly twenty years I studied and worked in this bastion of learning and modernism. At the time I was hardly aware of the fact that this institution also provided a safe space for the visual arts to germinate. Okay, I had seen Karel Appel’s ceramic artwork on the façade, above the entrance of the main building, but that was pretty much it. It wasn’t until much later — thanks to the unbridled enthusiasm of Anne Clement-Van Vugt, Advisor of Art Affairs at Erasmus University — that I found out just how many visual artists from the post-war reconstruction period had left behind sculptures and paintings, filling every nook and cranny of this university. Cor van Kralingen, for instance, or Bouke Ylstra, Dick Elffers, Ger van Iersel, Piet van Stuijvenberg, Han Rehm, Charlotte van Pallandt, Lucebert. Illustrious names, familiar to us because they were responsible for adding a bit of colour, personality, and panache to the grey, geometric city of Rotterdam after the war. The notion that artists need to be involved in developing the built environment became firmly embedded here. To this day, the Erasmus University is still commissioning artists to make new work. Just like the city itself, the university is in a permanent state of transformation and transition. Those who pay close attention to their surroundings will therefore discover work by Henri Jacobs, Charlotte Schleiffert, Hans Citroen, Luuk Bode, Paul Cox, Willem Oorebeek, Barbara Helmer, Kathrin Schlegel, and many others.
This place, the Erasmus Gallery, is an example of this commendable policy. Here students and teachers are introduced to developments in the visual arts in a relaxed and accessible way (unless they have the bad fortune to stumble upon an exhibition with items from the university’s extensive bronze medal collection, a tradition dating back to the time when the institution was still a School of Economics). The Gallery showcases artists whose work has been recently added to the university collection, or artists who are of particular interest to the art committee. Today that artist is Anuli Croon.
Art critics and curators seem to define Anuli’s work instinctively. Her paintings are associated with advertisements and folk art, with comics and cartoons, with graffiti and street art, with graphic design and visual information. This is why her work is so well-suited to the public space. Anuli is not afraid of size and scale, prefers large gestures, does not appear to be wasting time on adding too many details, uses opulent and extravagant colours — nice and bright too —, and she confronts us with recognizable depictions and archetypal life forms: a head, a nose, a tronie*, a hand, a body, a plant, a tree, a block of flats, or even a horse, a dolphin, shark jaws, a dog, a bird.
But who are those figures? What are they doing here? Whose heads, bodies, noses and hands are we looking at? Are they alluding to actual people or are they abstractions? Some authors have described Anuli’s characters and tronies as ‘disturbingly anonymous’. I disagree. I see myself, the other, each other — no anonymity at all; I see our own species, but I also sense humanity, warm heartedness, protection, empathy — a mind-boggling sense of optimism in a time of crisis and doubt. There is still hope for homo sapiens. Moreover, Anuli’s depictions are relational and show signs of interest. How do we relate to each other and to the world?
In a giant painting that was applied to the walls of the CMH, the Central Military Hospital, in Utrecht, an archetypical Anuli Croon hand is resting on the shoulder of an equally archetypical Anuli Croon character. Rarely were concepts like ‘putting at ease’, ‘nearness’, and ‘care’ — rather important characteristics for a hospital after all — depicted in such a simple and striking way, yet captured so autonomously, in a single, balanced artwork.
Anuli’s work for the Citizen M hotel in Rotterdam is just as powerful. Without her figurative play of forms (again featuring colourful tronies, torsos, noses, arms, and hands), the hotel would be nothing more than a humble guesthouse, hardly noticed by tourists. But now they line up outside to gaze through its windows in the hope of catching a glimpse of Anuli’s art. The hands featured in this work are not resting on anyone’s shoulder, but instead on the torsos, pressed against the hearts. The interior is thus saying ‘Fawaka’, which means ‘How’s it going?’ in Surinamese slang. Isn’t that a wonderful example of interior architecture? A warm welcome, nicely framed by the hotel. An impulse evoking memories of the Rotterdam master of post-war reconstruction architecture, Louis van Roode, who in a similar way added colour and identity to the hospital Zuiderziekenhuis and the OLVEH flat on Lijnbaan in the 1950s.
Right in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, Anuli created a mural in a street called Zwarte Paardenstraat. I followed that process from up close — or, more specifically, from a one-and-a-half-metre distance. This work was again undeniably executed in her own, signature style: a feast of colours, large surfaces, tronies, and those inevitable hands and noses. After putting the final brushstroke on the wall, the people on the many balconies in the street started applauding and cheering loudly. After all, everyone was at home — either working or unemployed, depressed or happy. To me this outburst of euphoria would be one of the most moving moments during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. While elsewhere in the country people were applauding for health care workers, in the Rotterdam Cool neighbourhood they were serenading the arts. All this commotion attracted the attention of children and adolescents. In the end, the police put an end to the illegal gathering. An unforgettable moment.
Today, at the Erasmus Gallery, Anuli is showing fragments and episodes from her growing body of work. I find this work immensely fascinating. I am curious what your views on these artworks are, and what questions they raise in your minds.
I am imagining how, thousands of years from now, Anuli’s drawings are rediscovered in the ruins we have left behind. Perhaps somewhere halfway through the next ice age. How will they be interpreted? What meanings will be ascribed to them? What stories will her tronies and hands be telling our future descendants some day? Empathy, forgiveness, nearness? Or — looking back on a long-lost past from the perspective of an unfathomable distance — tragedy, commiseration, self-pity? Not so long ago, I too studied the nature of Anuli’s work. This endeavour resulted in the shortest essay I ever wrote. And this is what I would like to conclude with.
Bang! After the impact, the dizzying colours are all that remains. Like dub from the echo chamber. Are we looking at recently discovered rock paintings, escapees from an obscure creation myth, adrift across time, intended to welcome the gods? There is total recognition: this is us. But we also discern coincidence, unintentionality, randomness. Is this us too? And just before doubt sets in and spoils the mood, we are hit with those colours. Bigger, brighter, better (than us). Bang!
© Siebe Thissen
* Taken from Dutch seventeenth-century painting, the term tronie refers to a study of an exaggerated or generalised facial expression. Tronies are not intended as portraits or caricatures as they do not depict an identifiable person.
NL > EN by Art Of Translation / Marie Louise Schoondergang
