Einelia

Erik Odijk

'Einelia'

Banff filters

Everything in Odijk's work is very clear. Forest, forest, jungle, stone. It's almost impossible to miss. Photography is the basis of Odijk's work, and it shows. No tree is invented, everything is first extensively photographed, in forests all over the world. Odijk pretends that this is where the real work takes place. The search for locations, the composition and ultimately the photo. The drawing is 'only' work in progress.
Which of course is not entirely true. After all, Odijk's drawn reproduction presupposes victory over the photographed image and betrays the true ambition of the artist. Photography alone is not good enough for him. It is too secondary, too easy and above all too small and literal. Photography is a source that should not bear that name. Because you actually experience the photos as they are presented in this book, as derivatives of the drawings, instead of the other way around. Perhaps good as documentation, nice as a reference or side note, but nowhere really alive, as befits a source.

The actual reincarnation of the depicted, nature, does not take place in the photo but in the drawing, on the wall, in the details. It is there where the world becomes malleable, where large and small go hand in hand and perception becomes uncertain about what was still believed to be true in the photograph. Odijk laughs a little when he says that the viewers of his work nowadays no longer know whether they are looking at a tree bark or layers of earth. Only when the viewer, who has become insecure about what is shown, takes a closer look, does the drawn world reveal its true form. Nature becomes art, a line an event. And so charcoal ultimately proves to be the only real source of life in Odijk's work. The drawing stages the resurrection of this dead matter, whereby the charcoal literally and figuratively rises from the ashes.