Emile van der Kruk

Emile van der Kruk usually works in wood, mainly poplar. His choice of wood as his medium is undoubtedly related to it being a living material. Wood retains traces of how it has grown. For this reason, he does not remove its life marks; they almost always remain visible, giving a sober effect.

He has a very unorthodox, extremely personal approach to wood. He knows its limitations and exploits them to experience that material restrictions exist to be overcome. He wrests his sculptures from the wood using a chainsaw. The result is not the refined elegance that one might expect from a sculptor working in marble, to put it mildly. On the contrary, hacking at the wood with the coarse saw produces a primitive form presenting an initial impression of roughness and harshness. Because Van der Kruk does not polish or grind the surface of the material apart from painting it, the sculpture acquires a conceptual character.

Van der Kruk often creates a stage in his sculpture, not always in a flat dimensional sense. The stage turns out to be a serving tray where personal rules and dimensions apply. With Van der Kruk, the viewer must ask himself whether the illusion of reality which is jolted as it were by the humour, is actually real at all. Is he implicitly referring to the (un)real world of the perspective illusionist M.C. Escher? For Van der Kruk, the use of perspective in this way is not a goal in itself. He uses these types of methods to insistently reveal the psychological essence of the sculpture. It thus constitutes an emotional form of expression.