Artist: Robbin Heyker
Exhibition title: The River
Venue: C5CNM, Beijing, China
Date: August 31 – September 29, 2024
Photography: ©Yang Hao / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and C5CNM
In Texas Hold’em, the river card represents the moment of truth as it offers a definitive resolution to the current hand. Despite the potential for the card to conclude the hand, players may still elect to bluff, thereby prolonging the suspense. It is commonly accepted that there is a rationale behind the act of painting. There is a visual source behind the realistic, there is an idea behind the abstract, and if there is no underlying rationale, it is considered to be the Emperor’s New Clothes. If we utilize Texas Hold’em as an analogy for painting, an exhibition always is the moment of truth, whereas the bluff or the mutual imagination of the audience and the artist persist. If one were to equate the structure of creating and viewing art with Texas Hold’em, it would entail not only recognizing bluffing, but also treating it as a crucial technique in the creative process. Such an approach is in fact, be in violation of Kantian aesthetic tradition, even treading on real life moral issues. It is worthwhile to engage in serious reflection on which is more interesting for the experience of art, to demand the existence of meaning or to acknowledge the impossibility of certainty.
Robbin Heyker is a painter, veteran birdwatcher, amateur magician, and Dutchman currently living half of his time in Beijing. Typography design culture and the quick-fix-solutions he observes in the street lives of China serve as sources of inspiration for his work. As a birdwatcher and magician, he is fascinated by fleeting visions and illusions. His paintings are highly ambiguous, as images lacking key information. As introspective objects, his paintings are influenced by the elite painters since the Minimalist movement, including Robert Ryman, Raoul De Keyser, Blinky Palermo, and Daan van Golden. He takes their works as a departure point and, with a deadpan sense of humor, reconnects their withdrawal from representation to the phenomenal world.
C5CNM is an experimental space located in 798 Art District in Beijing. It measures 4.75 by 5.25 meters and 3.5 meters in ceiling height. Its modest though beautiful proportions invite artists to conceive an exhibition as one singular art work. The spatial design by artist Jin Ningning is a multifaceted and transformational artwork that mixes with the different occurrences that take place within, giving visual experience also an “acoustic” complexity.
Since its opening in Spring 2019 C5CNM has transitioned between exhibition space, live performance venue, and “air b-n-b gallery” for non-profits, and it is open to many more interpretations (functions). We hope this quest for unlimited freedom will attract creative individuals or collaboratives from beyond the field of visual art to produce works. We can not anticipate the forms this may take, but only look forward.
C5CNM is free and open to the public 24/7. Visitors may enter the space by acquiring the electronic lock combination any time of the day or night and are welcome to spend time alone with the work.
