Seashores, Polished Stark By High Tides (On William De Rooij @ Le Consortium) by James D Bowman 3

De Rooij’s soon-to-cease exhibition, “The Impassioned No,” seems to me a spasm of outcast petals in wind. (A much needed spasm, deceptively calm, and so forth, diminished here, as elsewhere in his oeuvre.) The foxes of scrumptious vocab that have o’er and o’er in recent years displaced the viscerality of the visual, but also the shrewd intensity of chat; for it's an exhibition that showcases haunt-hymns, songs-for-eyes that dis/locate language in a rhetorical limbo far from the polemical purgatory between the post- and the neo- orthodoxies of whatever a too-broad term like “contemporary” attempts to mean. Potentials lost on those emotionally marred by the treacherous landscapes of disillusioned international politics surface in forms less marred, though rarely (and only slightly less). These Rooij has made it his business to interrogate. From the press release: “Since the beginning and in many instances De Rooij’s installations included the work of other artists and artifacts from historical and anthropological collections that relate to his own works, forming temporary groupings, which create new layers of meaning. Different formats and shared authorship have always been important in De Rooij’s concept and are the central axis of his new monumental installation of the Fong-Leng’s street-wear collection. Known for her unique and often extravagant garments, she sees her creations as sculptures rather then clothes, and repeatedly described the production of her pieces as a process of construction, or building. Besides these impressive creations Fong Leng also designed more wearable clothing, less labor-intensive. This low production is the new material of de Rooij’s display that embody the ambiguity, the structural polarity, the abstract concepts of opposition, contrast, transition, and nuance.” Rain-drenched limousine scenes. Icicle rides through bruised volcanoes. Our sores all ooze: substantial blisters. Are we here offered an escape hatch? If we undergo (from without, and then into within) an unprecedented freshening, the recent past will seem so dated, so inept a container: an artifact from a humorous political cult of outmoded ideologies that weren’t up to the task as hand.