Art Exhibition, Driaan Claassen

Forms of Silence: A Solo Exhibition by Driaan Claassen
Special project as part of the Cosmoscow 2022 VIP and Parallel program

The exhibition concept and space design by architect Aiya Lisova.

"My greatest inspiration is silence. There’s something incredibly humbling when surrounded by silence. It’s a sort of catalyst that bonds ideas and inspiration" (Driaan Сlaassen).

Driaan Claassen's meditative and process-oriented creativity is imbued with the inspiration gained from communicating with nature — an inexhaustible source of tangible and applicable forms. The artist carefully chooses his visual vocabulary. Exquisite work both with material, be it wood, bronze, copper, spring steel, or aluminum, and with the shape of objects invites the viewer to almost tactile interaction and evokes a wide range of associations.

Driaan's creative method lies in working with the idea of non-linear processes occurring around and within the human being. He does so through research, including various religious practices and psychedelics. He is interested in finding a tangible form to express an intangible structure such as a thought process, memories, or emotions. The desire to convey the infinite richness of the mind is expressed by appealing to the idea of the fractal. Many objects in nature have fractal properties, for example, coasts, clouds, tree crowns, and fern leaves.

The artist highlights the simplest fragments in the complex schemes of any pattern. His sculptures of basic forms—a cube or a sphere—are intended as a symbolic gesture of taming and organizing nature. This line is further developed by large wooden sculptures whose forms refer to well-read images in nature, while at the same time they can be a visual embodiment of a thought process. "A lot of what I do is a celebration of this complexity and ambiguity. I never seek to present my work as some type of resolution but rather as hypotheses," says the sculptor.