Vecinos Verticales 2007. With music by Leopoldo Amigo. La Metro Hall. Valencia.
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Vertical Neighbors of Monique Bastiaans. Music: Leopoldo Amigo
Dutch artist Monique Bastiaans has transformed the Lametro room into a vast aquarium, which can be captured at a glance from the outside and fully appreciated once inside.
Among the most important recent discoveries is the discovery of life forms buried in the depths of the sea. The common theory was that nothing could survive in such environments, but many communities of microorganisms, called extremophiles, thrive under these extreme conditions. This discovery represents a fundamental breakthrough, revealing an alien life form within the Earth.
The fact that new species exist at certain temperatures and depths seems astonishing. The same astonishment is caused by the red rain that fell in India in 2001. It was discovered that this rain was made up of living particles that had arrived in the tail of a meteorite. Scientists concluded that the specks, which vaguely resemble red blood cells, are possibly not of terrestrial origin. From both above and below, Monique Bastiaans received news of the existence of 'extreme' organisms.
Hence the title Vecinos Verticales.After a thorough investigation focused on extremophiles, Monique Bastiaans exhibits a collection of creatures from her imagination, due to her interest in these beings. His sculptures, made of organic forms and synthetic materials, live in symbiosis with the environment.
Beings related by the line drawn between the highest and the lowest, which the artist displays in her exhibition. Those who descend into the Colon Metro station will encounter this underwater aquarium, so that the vertical neighbors will now be them, the passengers themselves who enter the station from above.
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When Paul Valéry states, "My verses have the meaning they are intended to give them," he directly addresses the relationship between the artist, the work of art, and the viewer or recipient. A complex system of relationships that makes art one of the most creative, innovative, and ingenious media we know. In this sense, Monique Bastiaans's work denotes a clear intention to communicate and a sincere social commitment. This work is characterized, a priori, by its formal exquisiteness and, above all, by the use of techniques and materials that keep her at the forefront of the avant-garde, understanding avant-garde as the ability of an artist to continually reinvent themselves. The use of fabrics, plastics, and silicones keeps Monique Bastiaans in a continuous search for technical, formal, and aesthetic solutions. The material reference is a constant, of course, but perhaps the most interesting aspect of her work is its adaptation to the medium or space. She is an artist with a great ability to situate work and environment. The criteria for adaptation are reminiscent of many of the proposals site specific From the 1960s, those designed to function in a specific environmental or social setting. Another of its distinctive features is the influence of Pop Art regarding the use of techniques such as serialization or repetition, the intense color, and the use of everyday elements of contemporary life such as floats, balloons, and balls, which constantly draw on popular culture. However, it is striking that these commonly used elements that he integrates into his work acquire a completely different interpretation when inserted into a specific environment with a different purpose.
In the sixties, during the heyday of minimal art, There was a maxim that described it as the greatest order with the minimum number of elements, which gave the minimal a procedure, a way of becoming easily recognizable. Serialization, ordered accumulation, and above all, reduction to very defined geometric forms laid the foundations for part of the new contemporary sculpture that Wolheim defined in 1965 as minimal art, A minimal state of order and complexity. Module as a system of repetition with a methodical character that, in Monique Bastiaans's work, goes beyond an order reduced to simple permutations; they are more organic constructions, with an orderly but random growth, often reminiscent of cellular growth. There is also an interest in abandoning the exclusive system of disciplines derived from high art. Monique Bastiaans is a very unique artist whose works go beyond the framework of the studio or gallery. Like many other artists who work in installation or public art, she has that capacity to adapt and, above all, to make the most of the means and ends at her disposal. As Kaprow said, in relation to the supposed overcoming of established genres, "the new fruitful direction to take is towards those areas of the everyday world that are less abstract, less similar to a box, such as exteriors, a street intersection, a factory, or the seashore." Places where Monique Bastiaans most fully expresses her desires, her thoughts, her critiques. As in the environment From the 1960s, he creatively appropriated the real dimensions of space, configuring it as a new visual medium. Unconventional exhibition spaces, occupied, lived-in spaces, where a type of work is installed with morphological characteristics that give it a more lively and less object-like appearance. His interest in the technological world and his forays into kinetic art result in a body of work that is eclectic in reference, not in a pejorative sense, but rather as a set of connotations that make it more complete.
The work of Valencia-based Dutch artist Monique Bastiaans does not conform to the canons of any specific movement or trend. However, a revisionist look at her entire output reveals certain similarities that make her work seamlessly coordinated and continually evolving, never fitting into an established genre. Her forays into art and nature have made her a leading artist in this type of work. In my opinion, her most representative work is an intervention in the fields of Ribarroja entitled Adeu Tristesa, where she transformed a field of already dead orange trees into a colorful tapestry that restored joy to the surroundings. It is, without a doubt, an intervention that encompasses most of the characteristics we have been defining regarding her work, but it is in this exhibition at the Sala Lametro in Valencia where her unique way of interpreting a place that is not easy to intervene, largely because it is projected more towards the exterior than the interior, can be seen with absolute clarity. The fact that it offers a glass window, like a showcase, that gives a glimpse of what is on display inside makes the spectator a casual visitor who, in their daily transit, has a very ephemeral yet powerful perspective of the space. Monique Bastiaans is aware of this circumstance and subordinates this installation to it, transforming the room into an enormous aquarium that can be apprehended with a quick glance from the outside and savored in its entirety once one enters its interior. Through the accumulation of elements, he achieves that, in many of his works, the high degree of meticulousness and sensitivity is combined with another ever-present attribute: spectacularity and visual impact.
In conclusion, we must highlight her respect for the environment, her social conscience, her strong convictions of commitment, and, above all, her remarkable ability to adapt her work to the pre-existing discourses that often drive most initiatives related to ephemeral art. Monique Bastiaans is one of the most significant contributors to contemporary art in recent years. She is present in most national and international art events and discourses. Her work is highly varied, with clear feminist content, social criticism, the recovery of memory, and a special sensitivity to the environment, with numerous forays into nature and also into the public sphere. In short, she is an artist with a remarkable ability to adapt her work to a wide range of artistic, social, and even political discourses. Her medium, the installation, uses new materials, which is shaped through new challenges in each new work. But it is this ability to engage in varied discourses while maintaining a series of aesthetic references that makes her works easily recognizable. Although at first glance and on first reading they may seem overwhelmingly aesthetic and somewhat object-oriented, Monique Bastiaans is an artist who brings us a multitude of diverse experiences, an indication that her conditional criteria conform, with exquisite fidelity, to the arguments that shape her definitive work.
Toni Calderón, art critic
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The Playful and the Reflective
Let us take metaphorically speaking the premise of French philosopher Lean Baudrillard's randomness, in which he describes how we find ourselves in a world in which the subject and object no longer exist, harmoniously distributed in the register of knowledge:
»Regarding random phenomena, they are not only found in things or material bodies: we are also part of the molecular microcosm through our own thinking, and that is what creates the radical uncertainty of the world.
The sculptural compositions that the Belgian artist Monique Bastiaans (Jemappes, Mons, 1954) presents in the Lametro room under the title Vecinos Verticales They reflect on other shared microcosms in our universe, their coexistence in our immediate surroundings, offering us a work of exaltation of the natural, where organic forms and synthetic materials live in symbiotic randomness with the environment. It is a work developed from the emphasis placed on the eland, in vital energy, in joy, from a territory where the playful and the reflective meet.
Monique creates installations that play with sight and touch to evoke passions and conflicting emotions in the viewer.
Gradually, her sculptures, rendered in different types of fabrics, plastics, and silicones, lead Monique Bastiaans to a continuous search for technical, formal, and aesthetic solutions wrapped in an abstract language, also reflecting her fondness for organic forms such as algae, plants, and marine organisms. The ensemble acquires a very lively air. The sophisticated interplay of light and richly nuanced sounds, created by composer Leopoldo Amigo, accentuates the abstract effect of the composition; enigmatic seascapes intervened amidst the chaos of the metropolis. Bastiaans fuses the formal and the conceptual in a stimulating vocabulary that seeks to break our routine view by confronting us with other concepts of reality. An intimate installation where the magical and the enigmatic converge in a rational critique of our most immediate reality.
Rosa Ulpian,
The Levant, Postscript 8-6-2007
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….The exhibition turns the room into a huge aquarium that can be observed from both inside and outside.After meticulous research focused on extremophiles, microorganisms from the seabed that thrive under extreme conditions, Monique Bastiaans exhibits a collection of creatures born from her imagination, driven by her interest in these beings. These creatures are related by the line drawn between the highest and the lowest, which the artist depicts in her exhibition.
His sculptures, made of organic forms and synthetic materials, live in symbiosis with the environment…..
…Those who descend upon the Colon Metro station will find themselves in this underwater aquarium, so the vertical neighbors will now be them, the passengers themselves who enter the station from above.
Bastiaans is characterized by his great ability to place work and environment, adapting to the media and space…
Salvador Torres
The World 11 – June – 2007