21.03.2019 Brabants Dagblad | art review by Gerrit van den Hoven: ‘Van Hieruit’ saved by Chantal Rens
(…) it is copy-paste, but with scissors and a glue pot. Rens has a large archive of publications and magazines from which she takes and edits photos. Playful interventions, sometimes subtle, sometimes radical, give the photos an enormous twist. Her work is extremely precise and works best in her self-published books. Rens has a crowd of fans who fall for her subtle humour. (…) her work is a bright beam of sun.
02.2019 Mister Motley | text by Alex de Vries: CHANTAL RENS QUEEN OF COLLAGE
(…) In her collages, which she cuts and pastes by hand, she transforms existing images into non-existent images. For this she uses images that have or get a timeless content in the combination of images that she makes. She draws from a large archive that she creates herself. She has a special feeling for magazines and other publications that she finds everywhere and nowhere, where time stands still. In it, she discovers photographs of people, animals and things that show an idealised life, and which are at the same time staggering in the blind faith in society that is created with it. These pictures always show the superlative of something. Chantal Rens cannot go far enough in that regard, as long as the obviousness of the situation is intact and its artificiality is at the same time showy. She demonstrates the artificial ideals in these representations by changing something with delicate irony, sometimes barely perceptible, but often inescapable in the flagrant violation of the existing image. In her book “Common Sense is a Hungry Bitch” from 2018, that astounding view of existence was subtly weighed up by her in all aspects of the publication, particularly in the delicate use of colour. Chantal Rens proves herself as the queen of the collage. (…)
08.2018 Printed Matter, Inc. about COMMON SENSE IS A HUNGRY BITCH:
“Common Sense is a Hungry Bitch collects an array of collage work by Chantal Rens, striking and uncanny interventions that challenge what you’re seeing. The warm and weathered quality of the images from mid-century vernacular source material lull the viewer into a certain comfort, the nostalgic tint of Life magazine or a family photo album torn and pasted into jarring contortions of people, animals, and scenery that are swapped amongst themselves, irrevocably mixed-up. Surrounding the collage images are carefully juxtaposed spot colors that enhance this familiar yet uncomfortable tone and bring you deeper into spreads where each image begs a double-take.”
02.2016 Gabriela Cendoya-Bergareche on my new book ‘YOU RUN AROUND TOWN LIKE A FOOL AND YOU THINK THAT IT’S GROOVY’.
Read it here and check out her website all about photobooks.
Chantal Rens has a healthy appetite for invention. In a manner reminiscent of Hanna Hoch, the sole female member of the Berlin DADA movement, she reuses, arranges, cuts, tears and piles her pictures on top of one another. This results in collages that are illusive, funny, obscene, mysterious, playful and cool. All at the same time. Not only do the images exceed the original meaning, they turn it 180 degrees. The main force of these distortions? Our vague recollection of the indivisible remainder. As with any masquerade, the frustration is in the visual obstruction. We are left with a blind spot but what we get in return is a sublime substitution. A good deal, after all.
— Erik Vroons. GUP magazine. publication GUP #26 the vernacular issue. 10/2010. portfolio online
There is a chain of simple similarities that link the works of Chantal Rens (NL), Marjolijn de Wit (NL) and May Snevoll von Krogh (NO) presently on show in the charming Luycks Gallery in Tilburg. De Wit, like Rens, makes collages; Snevoll von Krogh, like De Wit, uses ceramics and Rens, like Snevoll von Krogh, blows substantial holes in an innocent and ideal world that never existed in the first place. Put this way, it may sound as if De Wit has less to say than her colleagues but this is not the case. Her work is equally challenging – it is just less emotionally disturbing.( … )
The collages of Chantal Rens are made from modest materials: cut-outs from old magazines and unassuming second-hand frames that provide a multi-facetted window on a seriously twisted universe. A few simple gestures, two images combine, and nothing is the same ever again. Suggesting a world where anything is possible, Rens sets a clear-cut limit to the material she uses: there is hardly an image that does not date back at least fifty years. She leaves little room for nostalgia: the distance in time mainly functions as a reminder that nothing was ever perfect and it never will be.
Featuring most prominently in Rens’s work are people: couples, women alone, children (mostly girls) alone, a family photo; never a man alone. Nearly all faces have been cut out or covered. In several works replacing women’s faces and bodies by food makes them appear as dull or delicious meals – their bodies and minds serving only to nurture others. Two ugly baby parrots with wide open beaks are joined by an isolated human mouth. In the one image where a woman is shown free and independent, posing next to a Volkswagen Beetle along a road winding through the Alps, a big red blob falling from the sky is about to crush her and her car.
My favourite collage is probably the one where a sailing ship is replaced by a pudding of sorts, the scissor’s cut from the side of the paper to the boat now a towing line. Not only has a romantic and adventurous means of transportation been transformed into an unattractive looking course that would probably weigh heavy on the stomach, it has also become a burden. “And take this too!” says the title. ‘Too’ pronounced in Dutch sounds like ‘tow’ and to a Dutch speaker ‘too’ sounds like the Dutch word toe which is short fortoetje or dessert – one that I think I’ll better skip.
One by one or taken together, Rens’s works are poignant and direct, even when you can’t easily get a finger behind them. They combine wonderfully with the collages of De Wit, down to the occasional mountain scene, and yet it is the sculptures by May Snevoll von Krogh complementing the work on the walls that make this presentation such a well-balanced exhibition.
— Nanne Op ‘t Ende, It’s uh that way … Chantal Rens, Marjolijn de Wit and May Snevoll von Krogh at Luycks Gallery. 2013
Her work revolves around ideas of obstruction, abstraction and collage. In a playful, childlike manner she reconfigures idyllic imagery and known compositions into absurdist scenes. By implementing an almost naïve idea of surrealism she tries to adjust existing expectations of an image and it’s intended meaning. In many of her works she appropriates the aesthetics of nostalgia as a disguise for her very contemporary imagery. Old, kitsch frames and time-worn photographs featuring children and ‘greetings from’-scenery overlap into an illogically satisfying whole.
— TORCH gallery. group show Girls rule the world. 01/2013
(…) Her collages all share an unusual, slightly magical, slightly spastic, slightly menacing quality, as if they were put together by a brilliant but mildly distracted 3rd grader with asocial tendencies. This childlike naturalness of style provides a refreshing counterbalance to Rens’ essentially hardcore surrealistic imagery. Every collage seems governed by an unsettling, vaguely shocking, but nevertheless just barely emotionally decipherable dream logic. (…)
— Kim Adrian. Food Culture Index. 12/2012
Chantal Rens’ photo collages are beautifully arranged (…) Faces are hidden behind a dog’s fur or snow-covered trees and the head of a baby turns out to be a glimpse into a clear blue sky. Rens, who lives in Tilburg, works with existing visual material from old magazines, for example, and makes a new composition while cutting and pasting. Exceptional work, which is evident from the fact that her collages were shown at the New York International Photo Festival last year. Curator Erik Kessels praises her work for the spontaneous character that it expresses. That’s right, her photo collages look like they were put together carelessly. But precisely in that carelessness time crawls. Rens: “It happens instinctively. I have been searching for a long time. Suddenly it is there. You know it’s right. ”She reuses, (re) orders, cuts, tears and stacks. “The resulting work not only transcends the original meaning, but can rotate it 180 degrees, misrepresent it or even change it completely.” Kessels: “She uses the large amount of images that are approaching us nowadays. Images that we sometimes no longer see revive by making them collide. The collage that is created affects you much more than if you had seen the images separately and probably had passed them by.”
— BKKC icw De Pont museum artist talk press release: The beautiful cutting and pasting by Chantal Rens. 03/2011.
Chantal Rens was born in 1981 in Etten-Leur, the Netherlands. She received a BFA and a Fine Art teaching degree from Academie voor Beeldende Vorming Tilburg, the Netherlands. Rens’ output includes work in textiles, photography, collage, and sculpture among other media. She has exhibited widely in her native Netherlands and was also part of USE ME, ABUSE ME (curator Erik Kessels’ contribution to New York Photo Festival 2010). She has also been published extensively, with her latest artist’s book, BEING in SHAPE, a collector of collages, self-published in 2009.
— New York Photo Festival, catalog. PowerHouse Event Productions. 2010. p. 32
CHANTAL RENS alters a familiar imagery into her own reality.
— USE ME, ABUSE ME, catalog. KesselsKramer. 05/2010
Chantal Rens sent me a text a month ago by Fernando Pessoa, from the “Book of Disquiet”, stating that this text – among other quotes – fits her way of working and inspires her:
“When I write what I feel, I do it so as to lower the fever of feeling… – … I make landscapes of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations. Those who embroider and crochet in sorrow because there is life I understand well. My old aunt played solitaire through the endlessness of the evening. These confessions of feeling are my solitaire. I do not interpret the cards, as one who uses them to know its destiny. I do not consult them because in solitaire the cards don’t really mean anything. I unroll myself like a multi coloured knot of wool or make figures with myself like children weaving yarn around their outspread fingers and passing it on to each other. I just watch that the thumb catches the right loop. Then I turn my hand around and the pattern changes and I start again.”
I have known Chantal Rens for six years now, four of which intensively, insofar as you can really get to know students as a teacher and supervisor in art education. In the case of these three former students (1), however, I dare to say that there has been a certain amount of intensity. Chantal was an extraordinary presence from the start, and I am not talking about appearances here, but about the person in her work. Unbridled imagination mixed with a raging, unbridled need to turn her fantasy into images. Everything was enthusiastically embraced, collected, coddled and sometimes even cuddled to death; a crumpled piece of paper, a text on a bulletin board, a picture, a piece of wood left behind in the workshop. Everything she absorbed in her collecting frenzy was enchanting. She just didn’t know then that it was her discernment, her choice, the fact that she’d dropped her eyes on it that had caused the spell. Not the ‘thing in itself’, but her own magic made the thing transcend itself. Now that she knows this, it annoys her, sometimes to the point of despair. She runs, she stumbles over her words and images and yet every time this happens again miracle; the laborious process of the thing – found, collected, preserved – which takes on a new life, becomes a soul and image of its own Chantal now knows how difficult and laborious such an enchantment process is; grinding, sifting, adding, leaving out, purify to the bone.
‘Haasje over’ should have been the title of my introduction if this presentation only concerned the work of Chantal Rens. A title the refers to the progressive, flying movement that moves the body up and forward at the same time, with the hands and arms pulling back under the torso, between the legs, pushing off and pushing against an object, usually another body poses an obstacle in a bent position. A type of movement that is related to pulling a stocking inside out in an instant. This is how she deals with the ‘found footage’ that populates her world; jumped by surprise, pushed away and outflanked, left to never be the same, but always something different.
A complex process in which speed and imagination whip each other up, but which ends just as many times in a crash; scramble up and start over, it doesn’t come easy…
Another quote from the same book by Pessoa:
“It is enough that I see clearly, with my eyes or with my ears, or with another sense, to feel that something is real. It is even possible that at the same time I feel two incompatible things, It does not matter”
Just sayin..
Two years later, now seven years ago, the three of them appear, with a bus loaded with stuff, in the large guest studio in Helmond.
Chantal Rens drags bags and garbage bags inside; an unbelievable mess of clothes, patches, bugs, footwear, boxes, photos, frames with strange scenes, books full of bulging, yellow stickers. Within a day the mess is organized on a table, on the wall and on the floor; Chantal is at home. She has wallpapered her whole world around her, the adventure can begin. Trophies are added every week from flea markets, thrift stores, or from the street. Weekly the mountains of stuff grow around her work corner, she flutters from mountain to box, tripping over her feet and words. Meanwhile, structures and images shoot up as if out of nowhere; growths and broods conquer space unboundedly; Chantal is extraordinarily present.
– Appearance and presence, Mireille Houtzager, curator working period ‘Exclusief met…’ in the guest studios of the Nederlandsche Cacaofabriek in Helmond, excerpt from her opening speech 2004. (1) Pierke Hulshof and Haitske Teunissen.
Chantal Rens 