La Chimera I, 2023, polyester, steel construction, 272 x 150 x 195 cm—Rijksakademie, 2025
The works of Dutch artist Krystel Geerts are united by the intangible nature of their surfaces and materiality.
They appear fragile and open, like blurred memories of baroque architecture. Not least because the process of their creation is inscribed in the works. For La Chimera, Geerts created a massive gate out of clay and used her bare hands and specially made tools to create a ‘flow’ in the material. Fingerprints can also be seen. She repeatedly threw clay discs at the wet clay colossus, which ultimately weighed 700 kilos, and they stuck to it. Magnificent, ornamental and yet dissolved and porous, La Chimera is a document of its creation and at the same time its negation. Geerts has moulded La Chimera I in polyester and La Chimera II in acrylic resin from the original. The solid clay door, on the other hand, no longer exists. Although the moulds retain the appearance of the gate, they are hollowed out and light as a backdrop.