Embracing the Fold. Kinke Kooi and Roland Schimmel

Excerpt from the curatorial text of the exhibition: [...] Together, the works of Kinke Kooi and Roland Schimmel form a breath, a two-step movement that flows towards one another: contracting and expanding, folding and smoothing out again, shrinking and swelling again, drawing in and spreading out. The relationship between Kooi’s and Schimmel's works is like a reversible figure, an inversion, a reversal from large to small, from the outermost to the innermost and back again. Roland Schimmel’s precisely placed, molecular circular forms find their counterparts in Kinke Kooi’s hand-drawn round pearls, berries, and fractals, in the natural and artificial objects and structures of her paintings. It is as if a temporal shift or a degree of abstraction has come between the two. The fold also appears in Kinke Kooi’s works as folds of shame and simultaneously as folds of self-empowerment. Depicted as a vaginal fold, a wrinkle, or a belly crease, it dissolves stereotypical ideals of beauty as well as unsettles the taboo of the female desirous body, which has been suppressed and made invisible for so long. The fold also functions as a hiding place, a retreat, and a shelter. In an interview Kinke Kooi has said: “I come to the rest in the holes of shame, as it were. I live in them for a while, I explore them.” She often describes how in the early 1980s, when she was studying at the Art Academy in Arnhem, her decorative, curved, excessive forms opposed the idea that minimalism and rationality were superior. This resistance resulted in a strong position that still permeates every pore of her rich body of work today, reappropriating what has historically been dismissed as a “feminine” aesthetic. For her, this process also involved feelings of shame and an impulse to withdraw, which she continues to thematize in her work. Kooi’s work engages with the fold in a way that relates to body awareness and also to the challenging of hierarchies: the way the elements in her work intertwine and expand suggests a non-hierarchical, interconnected world, in which no singular form dominates – this can be read as a metaphor for feminist ideals of relationality and care and builds a bridge back to Deleuze, who, however, omits this aspect of the “care-work of the fold”. Roland Schimmel’s paintings take up the fold less in its physical materiality and more in its perceptual dimension of expansion and contraction. His work does not only exist on the surface, but folds into the retina, into memory, into the nervous system, and renders perception an unfolding process. The way in which colors and color transitions dissolve edges and create optical instability points towards a folding of space and time in which vision is not fixed but constantly shifting. The dynamic play of light and perception in his work creates an intensity similar to how Deleuze describes the baroque fold as energy that moves through space and bends reality itself. Schimmel’s work folds perception into the body and anchors it in memory, afterimages, and neurological processes. Just as Kinke Kooi’s folds articulate a feminist ethic of care, equality, and embodiment, Schimmel’s perceptual folds, by dissolving fixed visual structures, may also hold a kind of radical openness, a suspension of control over vision itself. This embrace of the fold brought about collectively through artistic processes, points to a fluid way of experiencing the world –one that defies the strict categories of its time, rigid hierarchies, and fixed perspectives. [...] A full version of the curatorial text by Lisa Klosterkötter can be found here: www.temporarygallery.org/en/kinke-kooi-and-roland-schimmel/