Barendrecht
Pieter Janszoon Saenredam Project
50X80m reservoir and 30X30m island with
osier - 1982|1985/∞
sketch - for a 700X700X200cm sand mound
- concrete and ground glass - 2003
Ursula Poblotzki
'The artistic development of Lucien den
Arend, a Dutch sculptor and artist who takes the landscape into
remarkable consideration in his environmental projects, began
with painting from nature - or even perhaps with the shelters
he made himself of flexible willow rods as a child. On turning
to sculpture in the sixties, he not only made objects out of
bronze, steel and other classical materials but also began to
incorporate elements that he found in his immediate surroundings
in his work, leading on to a development towards his present-day
landscape projects.
Den Arend calls his work geometrically abstract,
and it is clear that mathematics and a conceptual approach play
an important role in it. He is not so much concerned with the
final result as with the actual working with materials, with
the constructive phase itself. As he wrote in 1988, "I study
delineation of form, from the inside outwards: transdimensionally.
legible form. delineation of space. scientifically." The years
that den Arend spent in the USA as a child and student helped
him gain a distanced approach to The Netherlands, his native
country, and enabled him to recognize the particular character
and potential of its landscape and traditions. As far as his
work was concerned, he was aware, however, that he would have
to take a different approach in the Dutch landscape, one that
clearly bears the mark of man's ordering hand, than in a "natural"
situation, where an object of art immediately stands out. He
realized he would have to relate his work to other designed
forms and that it would have to be extremely forceful in character
if it were to gain the same evocation as in a natural setting.
This could be achieved, in his opinion, through greater analysis
of scale; after all, in a desert a car is as spectacular as
a Boeing 747.
Den Arend takes the materials he uses from
the surroundings of a given project. Concrete and steel predominate
in his technical objects, while earth, trees, lawns, water are
used and given new meaning in his landscape works. He is very
fond of trees, such as pollard willows, whose rods will immediately
take root once they are struck into the earth and which regularly
change in appearance in accordance with the osiery tradition.
Another tree he likes to work with is the linden tree, which
is traditionally found in front of farmhouses in The Netherlands,
where it is planted parallel to the facade in numbers in two
or three, its trunks banded white with lime.
Unlike town and open space planners, den
Arend does not seek to create interesting or beneficial effects
with the natural elements he uses; rather his main concern is
with evoking the unexpected, and thus he gives hills, shrub
plantings, reservoirs and canals the form of curves, semicircles,
squares, lines and grids - an exercise in practical geometry.
Indeed, he set up a foundation in the small town of Barendrecht
in homage to the painter Pieter Janszoon Saenredam (1597-1665),
whose objective and scrupulously precise depiction of architecture
he admires, coupling it with a project that links mathematics
and landscape culture, Japanese inspiration and Dutch tradition
at the same time.
The project is
to be as transitional in character as both Dutch osier cultivation,
where the pollard willows are replaced when they fall apart
once they get old, and the Grand Shrine of Ise in Japan, where
a new shrine is set up every 20 years in replacement of the
old one, which is demolished. In this respect den Arend took
one of the reservoirs used in The Netherlands to help regulate
the water level and changed its quasi-organic shape to a rectangular
one, providing it at the same time with 16 by 16 rows of willow
branches in memory of the days when osier beds played an important
role in the reclamation of land. Once the branches have grown
into mature trees, their closely set trunks will be evocative
of the interior of a crypt. In June 1997, the 400th anniversary
of the artist's birth, and every twelve and a half years after
that, this "interior" is to be whitewashed to increase the association
with Saenredam's Calvinistic church interiors. The foundation
that den Arend has set up is to ensure that this regular ceremony
is continued after his death.
Art in the landscape is public in
the best sense of the word. It reaches far more people than
the usual works that hang in living rooms or museums. Landscapes
and urban open spaces belong to us all, and landscape projects
are works of art that can be experienced by everyone, every
day. Moreover, projects that include trees are able to grow
with the people and age with them.'
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