Page 68 - 1968 ... 2013 Soft Living Room

Sometimes I don’t see have an illogical relation is extremely comforting to me.
Over and over again the greatest works that mankind

anything. have erected in the past in their attempts to explain
omnipotence have surprised me by their imperfection.

Maria van Elk
Sometimes I don’t see anything. Henk Peeters
Fortunately I do not remember such an unfortunate Hall, April 27, 1986
event.
Suppose…
Often I only see very little. It’s recollection disappears
usually rapidly.
But sometimes I do see very little although it is enough
to remember it again and again.
This came to when I saw for the first time an extensive
overview of the work of Maria van Elk in the ‘Stedelijk
Museum Amsterdam’ in 1981.
There was also extremely little to be seen if one takes
into account how little was attempted with the paper
she used for her works.
Maybe you know me as an expert in the limited field
of the little. So you can imagine I feel called to let you
know about the little Maria van Elk has to tell you.
My experience is that this can’t be done with few
words. On the contrary: the scope of a statement is
inversely proportional to what is observed.
But that happens more often.
Strictly speaking, her drawings are an explanation of
reality that can’t be surveyed in all its dimensions.
From the indistinct amount of images in which reality
present itself she makes her choice.
The larger the number of possibilities the smaller the
choice. From the ever increasing arsenal of materials
and techniques that are available to an artist only the
most obvious remain: Banal paper and the common
piece of chalk.
Sometimes it seems as if she wants to give us a logical
explanation of reality since the separate pieces interre-
late in seemingly logical fashion. Or, in an individual
piece, a simple law can be observed of which you could
get the impression that Maria van Elk thinks that
beyond the boundaries of the paper sheet there is also
consistency and logic.
But from this concept I would not like to explain her
work, primarily because I do not believe in this myself.
On the contrary, the knowledge that phenomena do

66