Marcel van Eeden
Celia

All of Marcel van Eeden’s drawings are part of an extensive project he has been working on since 1993: redrawing photos and other visual material dating from before his birth in 1965. Marcel van Eeden maps out the “before-now” in this way. While he draws, he immerses himself in the world before his birth. He takes as a starting point photos from magazines and newspapers, omitting things and adding elements. This “encyclopedia of my death” now counts thousands of drawings.

An exhibition of Marcel van Eeden comes across as an abundance of images, where the systematic approach in his body of work is underscored by the use of identical old-fashioned brown frames. The obsessive desire to hold onto what is passing by thus gains a strong conceptual foundation and is reminiscent of the work of conceptual artist On Kawara, in which time and place are consistently recorded in the same way.

In the ensemble Celia that Marcel van Eeden is currently presenting at MDD, he incorporated four literary genre books: T.S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party (1949) in which a woman named Celia plays a role, J. Van Oudshoorn’s expressionist book Laatste Dagen (1927), the fictional autobiography of Jack Bilbo An Autobiography (1947), and Robert Walser’s Spaziergang (1917).

Even though Marcel van Eeden seems to want to tell a story through quotes and images, it quickly becomes apparent that the works cannot be read straightforwardly and linearly. In this way, Marcel van Eeden’s drawings become complex and ambiguous journeys through time, where the connections between words and image can often be interpreted intuitively.