Author: Marcel van Eeden
Series of 25 drawings.
Black pencil, crayon, gouache and laid paper.
Several sizes.
The artist leads us around The Lobby installation in search of Oswald Sollman, the main character in this story woven with images, photos, historical and/or fictitious figures inspired by an enormous pre-1965 iconographic repertoire. The highly detailed drawings trace the moments leading up to a dramatic event. They are the first part of a rapidly-developing story which will be continued by Marcel van Eeden with additional episodes presented at different venues and institutions around the world.
Since 1993, Marcel van Eeden, like a reporter or an archaeologist, has been building a unique iconography, carefully choosing his sources in old newspapers, magazines, history books, textbooks, photographic collections and postcards. A warehouse of chaotic stories, ripped from their original context and revived by the artist’s compulsive recycling. This visual universe seems to be affected by a radical image, an irrepressible thirst to consume these images which, paradoxically, once satiated, can save them from oblivion.
The artist is not content to simply reproduce powerful illustrations or old images. He tries to draw each photographic image, everything that happened, in a grey area that extends from the start of the twentieth century until 1965, the year of his birth. All of those people walking in the street or sitting in cafes and restaurants, cars, trams and buses, all of the signs of life that are the subjects of Marcel van Eeden’s drawings pertain to the past.