Carissa Farrell discovers an inexhaustible fascination at the heart of Remco de Fouw’s practice with gravity, physics and the cosmos
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 cosmos. In over twenty years of practice these fundamental 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.
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