In this duo exhibition, we showcase two artists with a fascination for the hidden meanings of objects. In the monstrously shiny artworks of Naomi Gilon, objects come to life to represent our inner demons. Mirjam Vreeswijk uses collages of objects to create paintings that, like optical illusions, play with the conscious and subconscious. The materiality of objects also binds the artists: from the fascination with tuning cars or in a quest to catch the perfect structure in paint.

Sweet monstrous reality

Naomi Gilon's art practice grew out of her intellectual reflections on photography, the fashion world and popular culture. She depicts them in installations of unusual materials such as textiles, car body parts and stickers. A change in her work came about when she explored her fascination with tuning: modifying the appearance of cars. This resulted in ceramic works in which she takes serial objects as a starting point. Just like tuning, she tries to personalise them to make them unique, but without losing the original purpose.

The result is imaginative objects in which there is a continuous dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious. In the space between reality and fantasy, she tries to find a form for the well-hidden inner demons that inhabit us all. As in science fiction, she tries to capture these social fears and desires in words and images. Her works of art take on the role of your ashtray, jewellery or candle holder but can come to life at any moment. In this way, she morphs the indigestible with the romantic into a sweet monstrous reality in which the socially dreadful emerges and freezes into a solid and shiny work of art.

Divergent realities

The paintings of Mirjam Vreeswijk also explore the different layers of consciousness. A painting is an optical illusion, an image that attempts to imitate something. Mirjam plays with this fact in her work. Different realities exist side by side. While looking, you become confused by a constant process of revealing and concealing and changing from the manageable to the improbable. In this way she reveals the different layers of meaning that run through the surface of the painting and the subject. 

Her work arises from collages of objects or images that appeal to her in one way or another. For example, shiny ribbons, designer shoes and images from seventies ornamental books. From this archive of materials, she intuitively builds compositions, first in models, then on canvas. Step by step, Mirjam looks at what the image needs in order to eventually arrive at the perfect composition and perfect structures of paint. Her intuitive or subconscious approach gives the paintings a surrealistic feel that touches on elements of product photography, still life and landscape painting.