Marc Bijl
b. 1970, The Netherlands
The illustrated image of a melancholic thought needs a sense of cliché, a symbol that has worn out over our years of being a full-grown sophisticated adult. But in order to get a simple message across we sometimes need to go back to the (cheap) symbols that impressed us in our adolescence. In this work I have tried to come to terms with the past and present of feeling safe and feeling secure and fearing the weakness of the given structure. Nothing is safe forever, we will die some day, somehow. This very intimate thought has a broader (political) connotation as well. People are willing to sacrifice themselves. Yet we live in an open society in which different expectations of life (and death) are appreciated. My work needs to express an inconvenient and rather basic feeling of ‘protection’, ‘security’, in conjunction with the opposite ‘structure’ which we need to establish this. The safest place is six feet underground, but then we won’t be so happy either.
(Text: give(a)way catalogue, 2006)
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