The New Room
Robbie Cornelissen

drawings, animations

18 June through 16 July 2017

In his drawings, Robbie Cornelissen (1954) is continuously pushing the boundaries of the medium. At the Cacaofabriek Helmond, he recently realized the impressive installation Kantelpunt I (Tipping Point 1) in which his drawings interacted with objects of Karin van Dam. Cornelissen’s drawings not only acted as images featuring imaginary spaces, but also performed a physical role. Two giant line drawings hung vertically in the space, as a five-meter-high waterfall of lines gushing down, making them just as tangible as Karin van Dam’s three-dimensional structures. In a room on the top floor large scale projections of Robbie Cornelissen’s animations were combined with Karin van Dam’s objects that stood out as silhouettes against the animations on the walls.

In his ongoing animation series The Nr. 9 Sessions Robbie Cornelissen uses the stop-motion technique in which every new pencil stroke is photographed. He researches how an abstract, flat composition can evolve into a tangible, three-dimensional, architectural image. Recent animations from the The Nr. 9 Sessions series will be shown in the solo exhibition at the gallery together with several large format drawings from the Tipping Point installation as well as smaller works.
Man is mostly absent in Robbie Cornelissen’s work, making it harder to determine the scale of the rooms and objects. This preserves the magic of the drawing and entices the spectator into ‘entering’ the space for further exploration.