"Three years ago during one of my frequent trips to Schiedam in the Netherlands, I met with Piet Sanders, an art collector and client who had commissioned from us a crematorium for Schiedam. Piet had envisioned the architecture as a powerful artistic statement that would not only accommodate various religions and cultures but could also house exemplary works of contemporary art. With that in mind, we together visited art galleries, bookstores and museums in search of works that would have maximum impact. Upon discovering Jan Maarten Voskuil’s work we were immediately struck by canvases that bridged sculpture, installation and painting, standing out for both their enigmatic plasticity as well as their extreme precision. The play of flatness and geometry and the questioning of the canvas surface itself as a medium allowed theses works to simultaneously confront and harmonize the spaces in which they were installed, speaking eloquently to my own passion and work as an architect.

Realizing how different and oppositional this work was to the cacophonic nature of modern life, these ‘paintings’ seemed to absorb residual noise and the surrounding urban din, while confronting a past that includes the voices of Kasimir Malevich, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, James Turrell, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin and many others. In other words we were simply confronted with compelling new art that was perfectly situated for our time.

After seeing Jan's work in the Netherlands, I sent a catalog back to my partner in New York, Lise Anne Couture, so that she could perhaps find out if there were any of these works in local galleries. This however proved to be unnecessary because at the very same time Lise Anne was already looking at Jan’s work on the walls of a prestigious New York gallery. Lise Anne later told me of her fascination with play of light on surfaces and the shifting readings of the pieces as they were viewed from different angles within the space. This strange synchronicity of these two separate but simultaneous experiences tied to Voskuil's work was uncanny and apropos. The work is transcendent and migrates across categories, touching down here and there; it belongs in many places but also in its very own space and time.

Since that strange occurrence we have installed a number of Jan's works throughout our architectural studio environment in New York. We now live and work around a number of works by Voskuil and relish the open ended quality to the individual pieces that confront multiple possibilities as they gently inflect the spaces they inhabit. In our foyer area there is a diptych that always inspires me each time I pass through that space. Sometimes striking me as a seascape and island while at other times looking like some strange mathematical mutation, while at other times as I pass by I sense their subtle presence as if they leave the walls to breeze past me and whisper some strange atmospheric poem."

Hani Rashid

co-founder
Asymptote Architecture