Crescendo! - Ron Mandos Gallery
Crescendo! - Ron Mandos Gallery
Article by Artnews regarding 'Crescendo!'
‘Crescendo!’ Artist and Designer Maarten Baas Makes His Solo Debut with Music-Inspired Show
Presented by Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam, Baas explores the boundary between the quotidian and the extraordinary.
In Amsterdam, Galerie Ron Mandos is presenting the first solo exhibition on Dutch artist and designer Maarten Baas entitled 'Crescendo!'. The title of the show borrows the term from the field of music, referencing a gradual increase in volume of a musical passage. The reference of music continues in Baas’s work, both physically and metaphorically. Complementing the solo show, the gallery is also presenting two decades of prior work by Baas in retrospective format at the back of the gallery, allowing viewers to trace the evolution of his practice.
Baas (b. 1978) has become internationally recognized for his simultaneously playful and provocative design projects, such as “Smoke,” a 2002 furniture collection wherein recognizable, classic designs were subverted through burns in the design, leaving singed swathes of charcoal. Taking the vernacular of contemporary form and shape and transforming it through his own creative vision has become a hallmark of Baas’s work, as can be seen in other design works such as Real Time, Grandfather Clock – The Son (2022), in which the form and purpose of a standing grandfather clock is made wholly unique through its idiosyncratic assemblage materials and painterly clock face.
“Crescendo!” highlights Baas’s distinctive artistic voice through the lens of music and, more specifically, musical instruments.
“Musical instruments fascinate me for their inherent poetry—they can create something entirely intangible yet deeply moving: music,” said Baas. “At the same time, we live in a world driven by economic value and practicality. This mirrors the daily balance we all navigate, where reality is often less romantic than we envision.”
Upon entering the gallery, visitors are greeted by two pianos suspended from hooks in the ceiling, recalling hung slaughterhouse animals. From this vantage, the piano as an object for music making and creativity instead become sites stripped of their original potential, and instead mere symbols of commodity.
Other works throughout the show continue the dialogue around musical instruments and the ways in which their purpose and meaning can be undermined through artistic means. In several of the works on view, instruments have been obliterated and reformed into cylindrical shapes, like Da Capo Al Fine (Violin) and Da Capo Al Fine (Oboe) (both 2024). Despite the respective instruments having been destroyed and wholly reshaped, there remain clues: the violin’s wooden scroll and tuning peg, the oboe’s keys and bridge keys.
Across all Baas’s work—both within the retrospective portion and “Crescendo!”—questions pertaining to lived and perceived reality, convention, beauty, and commodity are brought to the fore, ultimately allowing for new perspectives on the quotidian and commonly held assumptions around truth and understanding.
(photography Jonathan de Waart)
