Every now and then we get the privilege to meet an artist personally. One of the downsides of an internet magazine that operates internationally is that a lot goes over the internet, using skype for example. We meet people at fairs and festivals, or at galleries, but we don’t travel all over the world to physically meet every creative you read about in Color Objects. We wish we could! But sometimes we do meet the creatives in person. (all images by Peter Cox)
Cecilia Vissers is one of them. She’s lives in rural Holland, she spent the first few weeks of 2014 in a desolate area of Ireland as an artist-in-residence at the Heinrich Boll Foundation, but would absolutely love to live in New York city for some time. It’s one or the other. Big busy lively city, or small quaint and quiet landscape. And look at her colors. It’s black and grey, or orange. How big a difference can you get. Orange is actually the only color for Cecilia. You can’t ignore it. With her black and greys it’s more about the forms than the colors, although for Cecilia there is something special to a proper black: it sucks you in somehow.
Cecilia’s work is very minimalist and appeals to a very specific audience. She’s therefore represented by galleries around the world to find the right clients to buy her work. However extremely simple it may look, there is a lot of detail in making it. Similar to Lex Pott’s work, Cecilia Vissers work is a process of manipulating metals. The process starts right at the beginning, at the steel factory itself and the plates go through several stages before it becomes a final work of art. The selection of the heavy steel plates at the steel factory with the proper graining texture and patina, or the perfect slicing marks, or just the right chemical treatment process to realize the perfect orange (an orange inspired by the color of molten metal). Cecilia is there for every step of the process, instructing the metal workers at every move. As if the metal was given a personal physician that never left it’s side. The aluminium panels for example, which go through several baths. Many artists using metals would leave parts of the process to the metal workers. Not Cecilia. She’s there from the first bath that creates pores in the metal for the pigments to settle in, to the sixth or seventh bath where colors actually settle into the material.
The detail is also expressed in something like her preparation for a solo exhibit. Cecilia then makes a model of the exhibit space in precise dimensions. She’s not flexible. The lighting, setting up the right pieces in the right spots, not using certain pieces by windows. With every consideration for perfection a new consideration arises that requires thought and time to make, once again, the perfect choice.
Art reduces the speed of life to Cecilia. Good art, makes you think about it for while. It distracts from the normal everyday things. But simultaneously art gives you energy. Good art has a certain energy within and as you look at the art work, that energy is transferred to you. An experience is communicated. In the case of the Cecilia’s work the texture, the colors, the reflection of light, the material, the small interventions made into the metal sheets that completely change what used to be merely a rectangle. All those elements together communicating that energy, as if there were a perpetual motion. As long as the art is there it will keep radiating that energy to whoever observes it.
