Rotterdam artist Ron van der Ende never grew up, and I and a lot of his fans out there are glad of the fact. Lost in the daydreams of a childhood spent watching and helping his father in his industrial workshop Ron's naturally honed skill for model making led him to create some of the strangest sculptures out there. Rather than having any particular style, Ron has a methodology, a passion, a compulsion for pilfering scrap wood and 'skinning' a 3mm thin painted veneer from its surface. This is his 'paint', found colours applied by strangers or machine and weathered by nature to give his work an almost photographic surface detail.
To call his work 'wood relief' would almost be an insult, the heightened sense of reality in his art is astounding, as he says himself he 'lives on the very edge of painting and sculpture. Since a child Ron van der Ende has been an avid painter, eventually going on to study painting at art school. His understanding of colour and tone being essential to the hyperreal quality of detail in each of his bas relief pieces. The bulk of his work focuses around transport, such as cars, planes, ships, and even the infrastructure surrounding it. Here's what he has to say about cars "Cars evoke our individuality but at the same time they are the symbol of environmental catastrophe, of unsustainability."
I should reiterate that his collaged sculptures are in fact flat, using various tricks of perspective and foreshortening this guy has managed to lead the visual cortex up the proverbial garden path of logic and over the cliff edge of confusion, especially if you get the opportunity to inspect the reverse side of his work. I think that maybe the point, the real driving force behind his work, besides the ecological message there's a sense that Ron van der Ende brims with boyish enthusiasm, both for the technological toys of mankind, and for pulling the wool over the eyes of his punters, however temporarily the 'trick' might last.
His technique is based upon practicality, mostly taking inspiration from found images, especially on the net, it's obvious that anything but a single viewpoint is difficult to achieve without more source material, i.e photographs of an object from every angle. After spending 8 weeks struggling with one full scale sculpture of a car Ron had a flash of inspiration, with the aid of a few simple perspectival tricks he would never look back.
One admission in an interview at www.diskursdisko.de he confesses, much to my delight, that he takes a great deal of inspiration from music. "Music works like a reality check to me. I’m not sure if it directly informs my art but listening to fresh and challenging music is important to me when I work in my studio. It keeps me in the moment. I’m always looking for new stuff." What's funny is that at art college our grouch of a lecturer hated us playing music in the studio, he couldn't understand how artists could concentrate 'with that racket blaring out'. It's nice to see I'm not alone in the opinion that music is an inspiration, no matter what your creative background.
Check out the rest of his amazing work at www.ronvanderende.nl, and by the way, do believe your eyes!
