Star Man

Many artists will return compulsively to chip away at some fundamental aspect of the world that holds an unfathomable and inexhaustible fascination for them. It could be said that every artist, and indeed every person, is hard-wired from childhood in how they understand the world and their place in it. Unlike formal education, culture and training, this subconscious mesh of feelings and concepts is indelible, permanent and will permeate every endeavour throughout a lifetime. Looking back over the career of Remco de Fouw this ineffaceable instinct draws him repeatedly to explore the phenomenality of water and its relationship to the ground, gravity/physics and the inquiries have been present in the materiality and premise of much of his work. 

In the 1990s three solo exhibitions in succession Reservoir 1994,Undercurrent 1997 and Overflow 1998, flagged his preoccupation with the nature and properties of water in its journey from the natural to the built environment. As his career in public art has evolved throughout the 2000s, the presence of water continues and crosses paths with other increasingly recurrent references such as natural stone forms, the night sky, constellations and his manipulation of natural and artificial light.

De Fouw’s curriculum vitae quietly lists that he qualified as a carpenter and joiner before he embarked on his artistic education. Equipped with this skillset, De Fouw started out with a tendency to adopt industrial and mechanical components to shape his ideas. His first solo show, “Reservoir, at the Project Arts Centre in 1994 included a fair amount of plumbing materials; distillation copperware, piping, fastenings, lightbulbs and circuitry. De Fouw re-purposed the contents of the men’s shed – and challenged it to be aesthetic. It could be understood as boyish and whimsical if it weren’t for their refined and poetic quality. Beams of light emerge from portals and light bulbs and patterns are etched on to the surface of enamel basins and copper kegs.

Omniscience – a depth charge sphere of shiny beaten copper dotted with flower-shaped valves jutting out – Expansion Chamber and Newton’s Deluge are upright orreries teetering playfully on tall and impossibly thin poles. These transformations of mechanical components present the possibility of a different kind of masculinity that allows for a greater continuum from the innocence of a Meccano boyhood. De Fouw shows how childhood awe of the universe, the cosmos and human invention cannot always be extinguished by grown-up knowledge of science and engineering. In 2017 he described this well on the occasion of the unveiling of his commissioned work, Atlas and Axis at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, saying, ‘I called these two pieces Atlas and Axis, after the first two vertebrae of the spine on which the globe of the head sits. This is near the area where matter and signal or impulse somehow magically becomes spirit or consciousness. It is one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, and one we are unlikely to ever have a definitive explanation for.”

An aspect of De Fouw’s career-long exploration of water that has remained consistent if not obsessive is his production of photograms using an extremely complex manual methodology that he designed and perfected through exhaustive trial and error (Fig 3). In a wonderful essay by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Leith, the writer describes the painstaking, ritualistic and physically demanding process required to achieve these works. In brief, it involves De Fouw venturing out into inland waterways on the darkest nights possible. Wearing wellington boots he uses a homemade contraption for suspending sheets of pre-prepared light sensitive watercolour paper to the flow of the river exposed by a flash also suspended in a waterproof bag. These works record intimate moments of brilliance that may or may not occur as a result of hours of enduring patience and, while not immediately readable, they are recognisable as organic and fluid. Understanding the complexity of their making opens a virtual world of fast-flowing river beds of icy clarity and transparent depth.

A similar analogue treatment of stone and light has also played a large role in many of De Fouw’s public art endeavours over the last twenty years. Turnstone, 1996 is made from an ovoid beach stone similar in volume to a large pumpkin. It was commissioned to mark the completion of a housing scheme for the elderly in Monkstown, Co Dublin. Resting on a capstone with muted ceremony, it is supported underneath by bearings that allow it to rotate. Appropriately, De Fouw inscribed the piece with a short line of philosophy about the passing of time that winds around its oblong form: ‘A stone dropped in the ocean makes a hole in it, the hole closes in. the stone goes down, the ripples go out, the bubbles go up. the sea goes on, resting on the bed, another 300,000,000 years go by.’ Its boyish simplicity fits perfectly with the more metaphysical theme and purpose of the commission.

Satellites, 1997, Silent Witness, 2006 and Eye Witness, 2007 are each made from large granite boulders that are split along a central axis into two halves, or in the case of Eye Witness, one single half. De Fouw makes obvious reference to Ireland’s Neolithic monuments – in fact Satellites was commissioned for the Brú Na Boinne interpretive centre at Newgrange and Silent Witness for Meath County Council just a bit further down the Boyne valley. Perhaps it is the unforgiving hardness of granite that explains their arbitrary “found’ appearance. In the same way that Neolithic sites can appear outwardly unremarkable but have buried within them unfathomable engineering genius that ostensibly follows the energy of the sun. De Fouw’s boulders seem split open by internally generated beams of light. Eye Witness was commissioned for a motorway section that split a rath ‘severely’ (De Fouw’s description). One half of a granite boulder that has been hollowed out and lined in bronze faces across the rath. The concave surface is etched with a scramble of veins and a stainless-steel pupil is punched out at its centre. The instinct to seek out the other half of this work is immediate and cleverly draws attention to how ancient landscapes are omnipresent and inevitably lost by contemporary progress.

In 2012 De Fouw completed his most ambitious and innovative commission. Voice, for the three-storey glazed atrium of the Irish Prison Service Headquarters in Longford town (Fig 7). This sixty-metre cone shaped work hangs at a height of fifteen metres, casting a dramatic bronze are that expands steadily across the length of the concourse. Its starting point is outside the building, creating the illusion that it penetrates the glass façade. De Fouw’s trademark granite boulder is at its base from which the tunnel appears to have sprung, Its form is slatted with the slats flowing in a slow elongated spiral that ends with a two-metre wide opening cut at a forty-five degree angle. On one level, Voice comprises a very fine and aesthetically pleasing sculpture fit for a corporate environment, but on another its ‘elephant in the room’ presence is quite palpable. Its title and exaggerated scale approaches a cartoonish disproportion in the context of the volume of space it occupies. One has to wonder if the pathos of the work’s message is noticed by the commissioners and staff that pass under it daily.

De Fouw has worked from time to time with Rachel Joynt on collaborative commissions, most recently two works that are linked aesthetically, Waggle Dance at NUI, Maynooth and MetroPropolis, located at the central Park Plaza, Leopardstown. Both feature a modular beehive structure made from curved hexagonal bricks that tessellate into ovoid and spherical forms. Waggle Dance is a hollow sphere that is missing two sections, one of which opens upwards to the sky as though probing for energy and light. MetroPropolis is shaped like an egg and thrusts upwards out of the ground forming a four-and-a half-metre arch located in a busy pathway used by hundreds of office workers bristling daily through the Leopardstown and Sandyford business district. Along with Voice, and another large-scale commission by De Fouw, First Conundrum at the Edinburgh Conference Centre, Metro-Propolis and Waggle Dance closely aspire to dignified works of corporate public art. But within the latter three, a stellar and mathematical association reflect the artist’s fascination with mystic understandings of nature and the universe. In First Conundrum a half-sub-merged glittering sphere is covered in an art deco grid of arcs and triangles that ostensibly hold important mathematical insight. In MetroPropolis and Waggle Dance, the perfect geometry of the hexagon engineered by bees is as profound and mindboggling as consciousness itself.

At the heart of de Fouw’s practice there is a ritual of deference to the phenomenon of existence. As he cuts relief patterns of circles, diamonds, triangles and arcs on great boulders of rock, there is no denying the obvious references to ancient and mystical belief systems that there is no explanation for. Without the slightest hint of fear of appearing sentimental or overly holistic, his work suggests that the egotistical hunger for scientific discovery might just be missing the point. It is as though every new scientific discovery whittles away humanity and the need for blind faith in it.