Iede Reckman: Palliative
The most important aspects in Iede Reckman’s work are the relationship between seeing and thinking, the subject and space in which his work functions and how he communicates this to the audience.
If something disappeared from the Palliative exhibition (or by contrast was added), it would completely destroy the balance the author tries to define not only in the space of the gallery, but also within his work. One of the crucial aspects, that Reckman tries to preserve for the audience, is the process of how the piece of work was created, the imprint of the human hand is what establishes the contact between the artist and the audience, simple construction systems he uses are similar to construction sets for kids or similar to three-dimensional models of brain teasers. The author himself compares the creation of sculptures to natural phenomena and he combines calculated elements with random ones. This is one of the reasons he works primarily with wood that humans are able to „read”, as wood has a close association to our nature and one can understand it. Reckman is deeply concerned with dendrology and dendroclimatology as wood for him is a very intimate material that is able to preserve information about the world itself and about all its changes that have developed in the course of centuries.
The main subject displayed in the gallery Kabinet T. is a tunnel reminding us of settings of a cosmic space shuttle or circular accelerators people know from science fiction films or science laboratories, except for the fact that the delicate wood construction has no sheathing and enables to see anybody who enters inside. However, because of the complicated movement inside of the tunnel the construction requires considerable attention from each person really going through the tunnel, the „view outside” is limited though. The time and space distances that Iede Reckman is concerned with, create new (and sometimes only mental) spaces that one may experience. He is interested in the way of seeing, the two points of view of an artist and audience is given in advance. The author creates masks for himself, he installs cameras in place of eyes that watch the world instead of him. The recording of this experiment, that took place in the middle of a forest, has shown a „human” way of seeing, but without a peripheral vision. Head movements and an expressive trembling of the recording is very close to documents capturing a new and inaccessible environment, remotely resembling the very first steps in the inaccessible places.
One of the most frequently repeated elements in the work of Iede Reckman are so called „Higgs” that he creates in the form of spatial installations or on surface. Each of these elements is in the shape of a cube that binds a bigger or smaller amount of further cubes. One cube serves always as a base and the number of spatial variations may become multiple (polycubes series 1 1 2 8 29 166 1023 and Higgs series). The inspiration has arisen from the famous Higgs boson (popularised as „The God Particle”), recently validated scalar elementary particles that play the key role in the clarification of the origin of masses of other elementary particles. The topic of basic shapes, balance and the rearrangement of particular elements for creating a new shape is crucial. Permanence is only relative, the effect of rearrangement of particles leads to the formation of other arrangements and to the reinforcement of their stability.
Iede Reckman (1981, NL) studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and then he continued in his studies at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. He attended several artist-in-residence programmes in the US, the UK, Korea, Japan, Germany and the Czech Republic. Iede Reckman spent four months in Meetfactory in Prague, he also participated in the exhibitions „Opak je pravdou” and „Typografie” in the Czech center in Rotterdam.