Mountains
(Maastricht / Boschstraat 37 a)
At first sight the photographic work of Marnix Goosens (1967, the Netherlands) seems to make use of the traditional genres of painting: portrait, landscape, still life. He uses these genres in a very personal and idiosyncratic way. Nature is his main source of inspiration and it turns out that he mainly is on the lookout for nature indoors. Wallpaper, curtains or posters that display a cliché ideal of nature are rendered in a wholly novel way when Goossens focuses on the fraying at the edges. The imperfections make for a subtle almost picturesque composition. The human longing for pristine paradise and unreachable destinations is embedded in these interiors that ooze melancholy.
Mountains too is an instance of these ‘paper dreams’ that are meticulously recorded by a technical camera. It shows a mountainscape that is very similar to the one on the boxes of coloured crayons of Caran d’Ache. The fumbled up photo is sharply registered by Goossens’ camera and shows all its imperfections; in a sense the poster itself has become a mountain landscape. After all, the artist once claimed, “mountains too are rucked-up zones in the landscape”. With a keen eye for detail he enforces beauty on a discarded and disenchanted ideal.