... but now it needs to be done ... | Nabuurs&VanDoorn

... but now it needs to be done ... | Nabuurs&VanDoorn

Is not simply an illustrated account of certain salient moments in the life of Van Doorn’s Grandfather (whose image is instead transformed into that of his Grandson), the videos have an autonomy and aesthetic completeness of their own. Here the artists are seemingly offering a personal compendium of their ways of experiencing an inferior dimension, they refer to this as a “manual of being submissive”.

The idea of receiving pain without any attempt to flee from it provides an interpretative key that is pertinent to the figures of both the penitent and the artists, since they both conceived their bodies as instruments through which to arrive at a state of ecstasy where physical pleasure and suffering were inevitably interwoven, being two sides of the same coin. They believe when the body is exhausted, a state is reached where it no longer exists, and where contact with universal consciousness becomes intense. It is not a question of knowledge: things come to you as in an avalanche of deep intuitions into life on being. Words cannot explain this sate of luminosity. The debilitating intensity experienced in these moments, in a sort of chiasmus between pain and pleasure, seems to suggest that, without the element of suffering, the inner space which is the only possible seat of any transcendental experience, is unlikely to flourish. This in relation to the artists artistic trajectory refers to a repressive socio-political context of post-war Europe. As said by the artists themselves “We are free until we reach the fences”.