Joost Barbiers

For Joost Barbiers (1949 - 2015), his first 'work trip' to Brac in 1980 was a real eye-opener. Brac is an island in the Adriatic Sea, opposite the town of Split in Croatia. The whole experience was intensely stimulating: the different atmosphere, the relationships with foreign colleagues working with the same type of stone - hard limestone - and in particular the direct contact with material that has just come from a quarry: 'You see how the stone is part of people's lives and you feel part of that community for a while. Sculpture was something positive and everything revolved around stone'. Other work trips followed: three visits to Brac (1980, 1981 and 1983), with in between visits to Carrara and Portugal, in 1989 to Zimbabwe, and then various visits to Brittany.

In the second half of the 1980s, the Golfbeweging [Wave] sculpture was created. On a thick base of black granite, three white marble shapes - or are they figures? - stand in a gentle s curve. The form of the standing parts are based on the waste material resulting from his last real figurative marble sculpture: curved fragments were chipped off as he worked with the jop (a heavy, wide chisel). He became fascinated by the 'free' stone and started to experiment with it. It is probably the most 'geometric' of Barbiers' designs. The white, veined figures of Carrara marble are the same height, they give the suggestion of an identical form but they are not the same; the tension is created because they evoke different phases of the standing element; through the distance between each other, they give the impression of constant, rhythmic movement. At each place, the wave reflects a different time phase, giving dynamics which at the same time are recorded for eternity.

At the same time, in 1985, in Portugal he sculpts his Dijen [Thighs] in hard, white Portuguese marble, his first sculpted fragment. The shape remains simple and recognisable: two thighs and the hips, straight at the bottom and sloping at the top. The approach is not at all naturalistic, yet because the marble is polished, the surface - the human skin - seems to be slightly translucent, giving the sculpture a sensual effect. Four years later, the sculptor revisits the theme during his stay in Zimbabwe, but now using the local dark serpent stone, a slightly softer stone than marble. The Torso Double and the Dijen were displayed in the exhibition 'De torso in Nederland' [The torso in the Netherlands] which was held in Dordrecht in 1991.

In Barbiers' sculptures, you can always see something of the material that he has used in the development of his idea that cannot be captured in one concept. Unsurprisingly, with this well-considered, time and physical energy consuming approach of the material, he resists the conceptual, which is finished in a second. 'You have so much time', says Barbiers, 'so you might as well think, and from that thinking evolves the object you make'. He likes to use the metaphor about insight and understanding: at first sight, words with a similar meaning but where modelling is concerned with grasping and understanding, the sculptor must see his sculpture in that block in front of him: seeing has to do with insight.

'By chance, you are brought up in a certain climate, your sculptures help you express what you want. When I am enthusiastic, the title sends me to the sculpture, but that can often happen in retrospect. I have learned to keep my options open: very often you base your work on the formats which you see: a sculpture starts with the boulder; it gets in the way of itself with that combination of hard stone and imagined names, but it is not black and white. A development is not something you start and then follow right to the finish; it is a certain loyalty which drives you'.