Playground Twist

The duo week exhibition Playground Twist of Charlie Kater and Marit Shalem at de Bouwput, Amsterdam, is a joyful artistic acquaintance. The artists take the opportunity in order to view their own work in the context of the other. This as an artistic blind-date in which they discuss equivalents and differences in their work: their process, their point of emergence and their intentions.

Kater presents sculptural wooden objects, some with a skin of canvas, in a color-scale of opaque to bright while Shalem does the same with the brightness of colors, while using the media painting, video and digital animation.
Both seem to deal with aspects relating to a human condition, a constant balancing in between imperfection and the defined, uncertainty and determination, routine and the unexpected

shiny moments. Moments communicated from the unseen to the visible, of wiring to an artistic language and to some old and recent masters (or farts). Kater to Donald Judd, Jan Schoonhoven, Carel Visser, Richard Smith and Richard Tuttle. Shalem to Nicolas Poussin, die Neue Wilden mixed with Kazimir Malevich and a jump-cut to Manga and comix.

Both emerge from DIY culture, punk-rock music, the 90es... embracing the skill, the discipline of the chosen media, mostly playful and at times laborious production of art-objects. Both opening up the space for those slight human failures occurring along the way.
Somewhere in their primal intention, method and clearly the outcome, they find an interesting difference: while Shalem pulls the viewer into a certain confusion, chaos and multiplicity, onto

a logic one has to re-define, Kater is minimizing gestures, seeking a reduction towards an essential single form a clear single structure per work.
Kater encourages the viewer to chuck away that daily to-do or to-worry list, the hassle and bustle and to find a place in time in order to immerse in the abstraction and simplicity of geometrics, a soothing rhythm and hopeful continuity.

Shalem does the opposite, one has to accept a complexity, a noisy dissonance and a back and forth between serious matters to the absurdity of connotations. She deals with topics of human communication, commerce and recent events and the way to redefine them through, yeah, geometrics, rhythms and a hopeful continuity.