*1953 in Ommen, NL, lives and works in Amsterdam, NL
A painter in his early career, Ousdhoorn takes the illusionary language of painting and applies it to sculpture to form a bridge between the spatial illusion of a flat surface and the concrete reality of a physical object.
Space and transparency as well as a desire for harmony and the classic rules of perspective are all ingredients that play a major role in the work of Reinoud Oudshoorn.
Inspired by the “spiritual” painters of abstract expressionism such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly, Oudshoorn as well is trying to create a level of perception that resembles a state of consciousness, where the immaterial transcends to the physical and not vice versa.
Because the physical experience of the sculpture is so important, Oudshoorn seeks ways to give viewers the experience of the totality of space through a relatively small object.
He achieves this partly through the materials and compositions chosen, but the idiosyncratic feature is to systematically apply the same vanishing point in all his recent sculptures, always at 1,65 meters. The vanishing point generally alludes to the invisible world that lies behind the point where all lines converge, in Oudshoorn’s sculptures it suggests an endlessness in the space that surrounds us, an infinity of mind and sphere.
At the origin of the creation process Oudshoorn’s sculptures take shape by staring at a white surface, a piece of paper, an empty wall or into dense fog. From a cross fertilization of the white emptiness and the artists’ imagination and experience, shapes of potential sculptures emerge, such as clouds, arches, windows or water structures, which find their first concrete form in preliminary sketches. Oudshoorn then develops them further through complicating technical drawings, which include all calculations of the desired vanishing point for that particular shape, to then be transformed into a physical object that is always hand made and unique.
Patrick Heide