It is through an artist’s perception that we are sometimes granted a glimpse of the unimaginable. The artist nourishes our astonishment by creating a world, through the artwork, that challenges the limits of our perception. It is to this effect that the images created by the visual artist Juul Kraijer (1970) distance themselves from traditional iconographies. The enigmatic figures in her newest photo series in the exhibition Chimaera are based on the human body, but she shows us its forms in a way that all but defies classification.
Kraijer creates a visual experience that is more than the sum of the parts of which the image is made. “Today the percept had swallowed up the concept,” exclaimed British writer Aldous Huxley, describing his radically altered perception, while under the influence of mescaline, of the essence of a chair in The Doors of Perception (1954). Juul Kraijer’s art seems to visualize such sensations, and to present them as a new reality – and as photographic artworks, because it is central to the experience of the new work in Chimaera that these enigmatic forms were photographed, that the creatures populating these images actually existed, however temporarily, in the real world.
Juul Kraijer, Chimaera
June 10 to September 3, 2017
Huis Marseille – Museum voor fotografie
Keizersgracht 401
1016 EK Amsterdam
The Netherlands
