Paul Den Hollander’s
Hyperspace of Color
After building a reputation with seminal work around landscape, natural history musea and early collections of botanic specimen assembled in 18th Century folios, PAUL DEN HOLLANDER is now coming out with a wholly new approach to the matter, the result of his obsession with plants. Since 1977, his plot of ancient farmland in the heart of Breda has undergone many a transformation from organic production to a plant man’s garden. The last time I saw it, it was totally unfettered from obvious utilitarian purpose, to grow as mature, opulent and full of variety as only horticultural tradition and experience permit.
If you would now assume that this photography would give evidence to this knowledge –in the sense of following Linnaean systematics, or focus on formal aspects of botany – in the line of Blossfeldt, you are mistaken. The first impression is that someone got on his knees and poked his head through the foliage. - When I did the same, I saw the usual mess of biomass in the usual stages of growth and decay. While Den Hollander seems to have decided to cast 40 years of experience aside to make images that abstract from this knowledge, putting aside the morphology and the classifications. The result is not an attempt at non-objectivity, but an experience of a reduced environment of extraordinary color and atavistic form, which only someone with such wealth of experience, also in respect to the technical possibilities of the camera could recognize. This a priori world is wholly his own hyperspace of color.
Shawn McBride, Antwerp October 2007
PS Puristic in content as well as in form: ‘Les Pyramides du Nord’ (1992) and ‘Voyage Botanique’ (1997) are two self-published books by Den Hollander, which have warmed many a bibliophiles’s heart and hence have been awarded for their excellence.
