Photography literally means ‘writing with light’. But until recently this light could only be made visible from the darkness, the dark room, a kind of alchimistic studio where through the use of chemicals an image appears slowly on the light sensitive paper. Apart from possible manipulations in the dark room the photograph literally reproduces visible reality as ‘seen’ through the camera’s lens as an extension of the photographer’s eye. In principle such a photograph can be multiplied infinitely.

In a large set of drawings Robin de Goede employs a technique both akin and adverse to the above. He starts with a finished photograph, or rather with a reproduction of it because he picks his material from the internet and consequently his starting point is detached from ‘concrete reality’ by two phases. That may not be all that special in itself but it is relevant with regard to the meaning of the work in the light of the subsequent process because the original photograph is adapted a number of times which consequently is increasingly removed from documentary visualization.

This starts already with the carrier: the back of photographic paper, in other words, an inversion of its ‘normal’ use. The photograph that was plucked from the net is sometimes adapted in a minimal way with photoshop. It is then printed, enlarged and copied on A-3 format and subsequently transferred to the paper by pushing the outlines through. Thus a line drawing is generated which then is ‘filled in’ with ink and brush after which the whole thing is covered evenly by moving a linoroller over the paper which makes the drawing disappear again while a black plane remains. Once the ink has dried the roller is applied a few more times and the drawing re-emerges, albeit as a different appearance, the picture plane around the outlines being dark as well. Finally ‘points of light’ are added with a cotton bud where this seems useful.

No other drawings look like these by Robin de Goede. Although during the process everything is done to alienate the result from its origin the finished product still looks somewhat like a photograph, or, rather, it shows reminiscences of a photograph without the viewer being able to wrap his mind about it. And to what photograph in which stage does the drawing refer? To a photograph taken at night, to a solarized version?

The interesting thing about this is that we just do not know and will not find out either no matter how long we watch it and the reason for this is that the drawing only refers to a photographic fact but is not one itself (any longer). Our association with photography is evidently partly determined by the way we are conditioned to look at this kind of image in our time. In fact the drawings have become very much detached from the photographic model. Instead of a mass-produced article manufactured through mechanical means we have to do with a hand-made unique copy and on top of this the development is from virtual to concrete, from cyber image to object.

Now the question is in what kind of world we find ourselves. In the first place the relationship between ‘visual world’ and the representation models of ‘photograph’ and ‘drawing’ is complex and ambiguous because of the visual strategy that is employed. They are recognizable in each other but simultaneously mutate all the time. Moreover the technique of drawing is interpreted in an exceptionally unorthodox way which reinforces the ambiguity. On the one hand the drawing was ‘made by hand’, but on the other hand there is no handwriting, no personal, individual element which can be attributed inherently to one artist based on some kind of obsolete ‘connoisseurship’; the method is increasingly impersonal (mechanical copy à pushing through à ‘exact’ line drawing à filling in à rolling evenly) which is an inversion of the way most drawings produced after or with the aid of photographs are made.

Usually the relatively impersonal data are individualized but here the impersonal is even enhanced by robbing the image of all specificity including the original context: the images selected from the internet were not found there in a meaningless vacuum but as illustrations of a text of whatever nature or subject – this is, however, impossible to trace without resorting to senseless conjecture. Thus every drawing becomes a solitary individual joined in a new context by other solitary individuals in as many ‘accidental encounters’. In other words, an important element of their meaning is found in their lack of meaning, some kind of homelessness, the fact that they do not belong anywhere; there is no home, no site where they are in place, as it were.

This attitude seems an exemplary metaphor of a disintegrated culture of which the fragmentation with respect to content is congruent to the visual one: a world consisting of pixels, in the end also the origin of these drawings. In this sense one could maintain that these images have been restored to something like their traditional dignity by removing them from the world of pixels and render them independent in a new form where the process is highly based on craft and thus individualized to such a degree that they exist only in one copy. On the other hand the question remains, maybe all the more urgent: a copy of what? There is no answer to this, in other words, each drawing is a copy  of ‘one copy’,  a copy of itself which – maybe and if so possibly to no avail -  is in search of its own meaning.

In our time the meaning of images has become highly suspect. In a sense this has always been the case since photography came of age. There exists a famous photograph of Stalin on a lectern with Trotzki and others to his side. The latter was artificially removed from the photograph after his fall from grace, one of the earliest examples of the way in which mass media not only record history but also falsify and create it. The tsunami of images coming our way today from all sides has long lost all claims to reliability.

Even when images are purely factual they migrate from one area of meaning to another -  “Is this a terrorist attack or a Hollywood movie?” But also: “Who sent these planes, Islamitic fundamentalists, the Israeli’s, the Bush administration itself?” – Everything is immediately susceptible to doubt and no conspiracy is exotic enough not to be taken seriously by some. When we can believe nothing anymore apparently we will believe everything or at least deem it possible. We lost our way in our images and consequently these images themselves are lost in a sense as well.

So why would we accept a drawing as ‘true’ of which we do not even know the origin except that its first source was, paradoxically, the internet? If we would be that gullible it would imply that we would accept every entry in the amateur encyclopedia Wikipedia and each change of it as well. And every website would become gospel. With the loss of the idealistic foundation of the internet mistrust of and confusion about information has grown exponentially. 

In an analogous way we can deduct no other ‘truth’ from a drawing by Robin de Goede (does he actually exist?) but that of the positioning of the thing itself which is in search of the rationale of its own existence on what almost seems like a different planet: the world of independent objects or of objects made independent and more particularly that of unique art objects representing both a material and an immaterial value of which the degree of ‘truth’ is derived from what people want to pay for it in the end, on its manipulation as a potential commodity and on the almost alienated love and attention of a few dreamers who, in the seclusions of their ‘elitarian’ hermitages and in an endless vicious circle, together with their allies or fellow-sufferers, remain interested in what the silent hand-made image has to offer while everywhere around them the continous images of ‘(un)real’ news are putting the world in a constant blaze. Whatever this art is about, it exists in a preserve.

Because all images are by definition suspect and the ‘art image’ is pre-eminently searching for the (im)possibilities of ‘giving meaning’ in a visual way and so on the one hand is contrary to the position of ‘all images’ while at the same time being part of them, in the larger scheme of things it is marginalized and, in search for meaning, migrating from nothing to nowhere, it is actually ‘empty’ in the sense that it doesn’t come with readable content while it is problematic to project all sorts of contents onto it without lapsing into poetry, total arbitrariness, solipsism or propaganda (for ‘the autonomous image’, for instance).

Nevertheless the drawings represent something, visualize something or propose something and refer to a world which is remarkably similar to the world we see around us every day. They are emphatically ‘figurative’ which could entail that some grip is provided by the ‘subjects’ presented or referred to. In short, we have to search for the specific ‘content’ of this set of drawings. If they tear away from their origin while simultaneously striving to be both impersonal and unique the way in which they go about this will not only manifest itself in the method employed but also in the selection of images and one may wonder whether the relationship between method and image selection is congruent, paradoxical, ambivalent or (re)presents and analyzes its own statement by way of yet a different rhetorical expression.

Anyone who would expect the representation to be a kind of deus ex machine removing at one glance all our doubts and inscurities about the position of the drawings (or even of images in general) in an overwhelming, cathartic epiphany freeing the viewer from the gravity of context as if lauched by a rocket on his way to a more glorious liberating statement articulating or representing a new utopia (the traditional role of the avant-garde) will feel deceived. Rather, the drawings consitute a mirror image of the above; the quest for a legitimation of their own existence results in a kind of tautology: I am because I am and that’s it. 

A few exceptions notwithstanding – about which a lot could be said as well but which I will use to prove the rule for the moment – the figurative representations are devoid of human presence although they all show man-made structures. Their common denominator is that they all represent a site, a place which is always recognizable in a general sort of way but at the same time represents nothing, nothing at least that provides a grip for further interpretation apart from the emptiness of the image itself. Maybe the image looks for meaning in the wrong places and maybe these are the very places represented here.

The ‘subject matter’, always shown in the twilight inherent to the method employed: a parking lot surrounded by houses, a bus shelter in an empty street, a solitary house, another solitary house, one more and yet one more, two non-Dutch phone booths without surroundings, a deserted motorway with lampposts and barren plants on both sides, a deserted motorway with a viaduct, a bend of a motorway, a glance into a street with parked cars, a number of identical houses in some kind of suburb or village, part of a village on a lake with hills, another street with an empty bus shelter, abandoned archives, an obsolete and abandoned control room.

One expects a site or place to be defined, the very words affirm this: we are here or there which means this or that which entails such and such and then we are on solid ground. But the common denominator of the places in this drawings is precisely that they seem to be situated in the middle of nowhere. This world is alarmingly unnamed, uninhabited, empty. Everything the work seems to offer with one hand is immediately taken back again with the other. We seem to find ourselves in a kind of simulacrum where nothing has a meaning we can relate to meanings we believe we know from our daily lives although purely from a visual point of view many objects remind us of them.

Instead of an answer to our questions as to identity and existence we are once more treated to the key question, as if from a mirror: where am I? – followed immediately by: who am I? When we are in a well defined space we can consequently try to find our way from there and track back until we know where we belong and when we know where we belong we also know who we are. But when we are nowhere, as these drawings seem to indicate, we know nothing at all.

The places shown by these drawings reflect the very question they ask themselves about their own position: what is my meaning, what am I doing here? The images are lost in the great endless nowhere that by the same token can be anywhere (none of these places are geographically specified) and ‘anywhere’ is no place. In other words, in the guise of something acting as if it were a place, we are provided with no place at all but with a series of non-places that on top of it all are interchangeable.

One could construe that this is some kind of zombie world: in the permanent twilight these drawings could be combined into a narrative about an accumulation of non-sites that together form one big non-site where many references to ‘real’ sites manifest themselves as a kind of mimicry. For instance: we have, among other things, a village on a lake with a few houses right outside it in the countryside, with phone booths, archives, a public lavatory, an infrastructure without traffic (motorways, a level crossing suggesting trains), in short, it all ‘seems real’, but one cannot be further detached from something than in the reflection of a mirror image. A deceptive reflection, an echoing well pretending to repeat what you said, both the drawings and the viewer are left completely to themselves alone and those ‘selves’ are not to be trusted either because we do not know anymore what that means in a world of which the (a? any?) existence is only legitimized by the vicious circle of: “I am the only copy of myself, in search of my meaning”.

A wanderer in the desert is better off because after all the mirages the barren land will come to an end, however temporarily, in an oasis. That salvation which may become a temporary source of identification, is denied to (the wanderer in) these images. He finds himself in a continuous no man’s land where the world, his identity, slips like sand though his fingers leaving him empty-handed: this world, for all its mirages, is really empty.

What remains is darkness. Or, rather, twilight. ‘Darkness’ already is too defined and has a clear counterpoint in ‘light’ whereas ‘twilight’ is a stage of transition incapable of choosing between light and darkness, there is something of both but yet it is neither. One could also construe that even the twilight is a simulacrum, a trick with a linoroller. In an analogous way the white ‘points of light’ become overstrained will-o’-the-wisps which do not point out the true way; they are, as it were, too white to be real light; the artist uses the cotton bud as a cosmetic make-up of emptiness, an emptiness which masks itself like a circus chameleon by taking on the appearance of the surroundings although by definition there are no surroundings.

Thus these drawings exist as empty images, as upsetting illustrations of what we cannot or dare not know because everything is suspect and unreliable, in a travesty of a never ending chiaroscuro: vague images, fed maybe by a hazy reminiscence or a hazy awareness of something more, something ‘more real’……and then, in the twilight, we actually find ourselves in some version of Plato’s cave.

The alchemist makes gold out of base metal, as a photographer he creates an image out of light. Robin de Goede, this artist of our time, is a kind of inverted alchemist: out of a photograph he creates an endless twilight; an image of which the positioning as a non-site can perhaps be named as between, that is: not here and not there but somewhere undefinable in between.

On the other hand the mechanical mass-produced article is transformed to a unique artwork of a totally different nature, a completely unclear identity and full of existential impotence, but still something has been made, something has been created, albeit something that can be a guide only by lacking direction, a guide to who knows what but still….. I think it might be a golem.