Le Rond Universel

Feb 16 - Mar 24, 2013

“Do you know what I mean?”

In a room sits a glowworm. It sits in a wheelchair and speaks into a microphone. In the background stands a bat, it fiddles with some things. Fossils, books, a model of the solar system and a crystal orb. The room is round, the interior of some tower. They are inside it, they circle around it, they look down into its circular opening from above.

In Le Rond Universel, Lisa Jeannin/Rolf Schuurmans show us how the veiled and the lucid can exist within each another. The scientific wish to understand and structure the world becomes intertwined with the mystic as the world’s most advanced science itself sometimes moves towards the occult.

Jeannin/Schuurmans work in the space that occurs between what we can explain and what we do not know. It is a world that could be described as surreal or mystical but rather it shows us that what we call logical always borders on the enigmatic and the obscure – something that exists beyond physical reality and yet is a part of it.

Le Rond Universel is an opening into an undefined world, a world that turns, where the microscopic and the macroscopic are inseparable. The universal circle. The thoughts of the glowworm spin in circles – born into and from each other, holding on or breaking – like the child’s before they are subjected to a generalizing framework that describes the workings of the world. Before they are organized into a so called understanding.

With Jeannin/Schuurmans, the vague and the ambiguous – a question or a loose thought – are as close to reality as clear answer.

“Do you know what I mean?”

Le Rond Universel is Jeannin/Schuurmans second exhibition at Christian Larsen. Lisa Jeannin (b. 1972) is educated at The Art Academy of Malmö (SWE) and The Art Academy of s’Hertogen Bosch (NL) and Rolf Schuurmans (b. 1972) at The Art Academy of Tilburg (NL). They have made several exhibitions in Europe and the USA and will this spring exhibit Sven-Harrys, Växjö Konsthall, Linköping Konsthall and Borås Konstmuseum. 2012 Lisa Jeannin received Edstrandska stiftelsens stipendium for the second time.

Text by Sara Skoglund