An den Winter 1932

Reijer Stolk’s 'An den Winter' at the Rijksmuseum is a drawing that consists of text arranged in a square. Imagine the artist hunched over the paper, carefully layering the letters to make a unified whole! I can see him working and wondering how can I make words turn into shapes? The text becomes image, the message is somehow scrambled and coded, not in a malicious way, but perhaps in a way that is personal and intimate, like a diary entry that we are not meant to read. Think of Cy Twombly’s scrawls, or even some concrete poetry experiments and imagine how language can be used to create a surface of marks that resemble letters. What a concept! Stolk transforms poetry into something to be seen, rather than read.