Barendrecht
Barendrecht, which is an old town south of
Rotterdam, asked Lucien den
Arend to make an environmental design for the Paddewei,
a section of the town, which was built in the sixties. But
when the sculptor visited the area he was impressed by the
perfect balance between the architecture and the green spaces.
He actually saw no reason to alter this. He did make some
proposals but they were quite cautious. It so happened that
there was a new housing area going to be built next to the
Paddewei, called Molenvliet. Since the layout was still
being planned, denarend was asked to make a proposal an
even more appealing project.
The sculptor proposed to change the shape of a planned
reservoir and enlarge in to accommodate an island on which
he wanted to plant pollard willows.
Years later, after doing his first sculpture for a roundabout
in Heemskerk, he was called
by a colleague, Henny Monshouwer, to join her in doing a
roundabout - also in Barendrecht.
50X80m reservoir and 30X30m island with osier - 1982|1985/∞
sketch - for a 700X700X200cm sand mound - concrete and
ground glass - 2003
from Topos European Landscape Magazine,
number 3-Â1993, Lucien den Arend: Landscape as Project
Ursula Poblotzki
"The artistic development of Lucien den Arend, a Dutch
sculptor and artist who takes the landscape into remarkable
consideration in his environmental projects, began with
painting from nature - or even perhaps with the shelters
he made himself of flexible willow rods as a child. On turning
to sculpture in the sixties, he not only made objects out
of bronze, steel and other classical materials but also
began to incorporate elements that he found in his immediate
surroundings in his work, leading on to a development towards
his present-day landscape projects.
Den Arend calls his work geometrically abstract, and
it is clear that mathematics and a conceptual approach play
an important role in it. He is not so much concerned with
the final result as with the actual working with materials,
with the constructive phase itself. As he wrote in 1988,
"I study delineation of form, from the inside outwards:
transdimensionally. legible form. delineation of space.
scientifically." The years that den Arend spent in the USA
as a child and student helped him gain a distanced approach
to The Netherlands, his native country, and enabled him
to recognize the particular character and potential of its
landscape and traditions. As far as his work was concerned,
he was aware, however, that he would have to take a different
approach in the Dutch landscape, one that clearly bears
the mark of man's ordering hand, than in a "natural" situation,
where an object of art immediately stands out. He realized
he would have to relate his work to other designed forms
and that it would have to be extremely forceful in character
if it were to gain the same evocation as in a natural setting.
This could be achieved, in his opinion, through greater
analysis of scale; after all, in a desert a car is as spectacular
as a Boeing 747.
Den Arend takes the materials he uses from the surroundings
of a given project. Concrete and steel predominate in his
technical objects, while earth, trees, lawns, water are
used and given new meaning in his landscape works. He is
very fond of trees, such as pollard willows, whose rods
will immediately take root once they are struck into the
earth and which regularly change in appearance in accordance
with the osiery tradition. Another tree he likes to work
with is the linden tree, which is traditionally found in
front of farmhouses in The Netherlands, where it is planted
parallel to the facade in numbers in two or three, its trunks
banded white with lime.
Unlike town and open space planners, den Arend does not
seek to create interesting or beneficial effects with the
natural elements he uses; rather his main concern is with
evoking the unexpected, and thus he gives hills, shrub plantings,
reservoirs and canals the form of curves, semicircles, squares,
lines and grids - an exercise in practical geometry. Indeed,
he set up a foundation in the small town of Barendrecht
in homage to the painter Pieter Janszoon Saenredam (1597-1665),
whose objective and scrupulously precise depiction of architecture
he admires, coupling it with a project that links mathematics
and landscape culture, Japanese inspiration and Dutch tradition
at the same time.
The project is to be as transitional in character as
both Dutch osier cultivation, where the pollard willows
are replaced when they fall apart once they get old, and
the Grand Shrine of Ise in Japan, where a new shrine is
set up every 20 years in replacement of the old one, which
is demolished. In this respect den Arend took one of the
reservoirs used in The Netherlands to help regulate the
water level and changed its quasi-organic shape to a rectangular
one, providing it at the same time with 16 by 16 rows of
willow branches in memory of the days when osier beds played
an important role in the reclamation of land. Once the branches
have grown into mature trees, their closely set trunks will
be evocative of the interior of a crypt. In June 1997, the
400th anniversary of the artist's birth, and every twelve
and a half years after that, this "interior" is to be whitewashed
to increase the association with Saenredam's Calvinistic
church interiors. The foundation that den Arend has set
up is to ensure that this regular ceremony is continued
after his death.
Art in the landscape is public in the best sense
of the word. It reaches far more people than the usual works
that hang in living rooms or museums. Landscapes and urban
open spaces belong to us all, and landscape projects are
works of art that can be experienced by everyone, every
day. Moreover, projects that include trees are able to grow
with the people and age with them."
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