PIETER LAURENS MOL »FORTY-FIVE FEATHERS FALLEN ON A FIELD“

In the late sixties, Pieter Laurens Mol (*1946 in Breda,
Netherlands) embarked on a unique artistic career producing
conceptual works in a variety of media: photography, painting,
drawing, sculpture and installation. A substantial part of his
early photographic oeuvre, dating from the seventies and
eighties, consists of images with the inclusion of a self-staging
artist. During the nineties the human figure gradually
disappears from the scenery and there’s a shift noticeable to
more known traditional genres such as landscape and still life,
yet these images could equally be experienced as
metaphorically charged statements on the “condition
humaine”. The photographs deal also with significant concepts
such as “falling”, “loss” or the romantic topos of “searching”.
Failure, both heroic and comical, characterises many of his
works. As Mol himself says, art is about the quest to find
pictures for an “extreme existence”. His “artistic life”
represents such an existence, one which he invites the viewer
to share, although the artist’s life is nothing but an image of
man’s “creative life” per se. This creative life is based on
physical (or other, higher) principles, which his works explore
and poeticise. In doing so, the artist seems to rely on makes
use of the Surrealist method of combining as he develops his
so-called “photo sculptures” that often refer to non-
representability or rather the impossibility of depicting reality
in pictures: words and images belong to separate systems of
perception which always only refer, as substitutes or
replacements, to a reality they themselves cannot embody
(Magritte, 1967).

In general, the artist’s photographic aim is not to represent
reality but rather to visualise ideas. Mol investigates the
semantic conditions of pictorial projection, ironically playing
with emotional projections in line with Bas Jan Ader’s
“Romantic conceptualism” (Jörg Heiser).

With a light twinkle in his eye, Mol is thus able to address the
tension between performance or staging and the drama of
great feelings. Sounding out the limits between the artistic
and the everyday object, he also brings into play how
museums, galleries and art critics define their aesthetic
position. The classic contrast between Romantic inwardness
and conceptual rationality can thus be seen to run through
Mol’s works.

Pieter Laurens Mol is not interested in an art that sees itself
simply as a platform for staging one’s own artistic subjectivity.
On the contrary, he is devoted to looking at and reawakening
the familiar – and doing so within art’s sheltered realm, in
which the smallest adjustment can influence how life, the
world and our own position in the great scheme of things are
assumed.