'Literally': by Scheltens & Abbenes, 2022

Scheltens & Abbenes are known for their detailed, highly aesthetic photos, in which familiarity and illusion play a mysterious game. However, the duo never aims at creating mystery for the sake of mystery. Instead, the artists try to reach the innate wisdom, or essence, that secretly resides in mundane things. The still-life sets, which they meticulously build up in front of the camera’s eye, are discarded once the images have frozen the moment. 

A Stain in a Rug was MacGuffin magazine’s commission, but Scheltens & Abbenes decided to approach the theme from another angle. From a local thrift shop the artists borrowed worn-out carpets and with large sweeping gestures they tried to remove the hideous stains they carried. The soap splashes not merely freshened up some colour patches, but also caused surprising new patterns - the fleeting moments were caught by the camera’s eye While being happy with the series of revived rugs, Maurice Scheltens and Liesbeth Abbenes felt the photos deserved yet another context. For their show at The Ravestijn Gallery, Literally, the photos gained a next life, this time by returning to the rugs’ three-dimensionality. The original photos, the size of which had been limited by the dimensions of the magazine, are now blown up and encased in Plexiglas boxes. As a result, the heavy prints lean against the back and slightly curl up at the bottom. A three-dimensional reality, a doubling of the illusion - Soap has become Whiff.

A recycling of previous photos, was also the starting point for the four textile works in the show. The image on the enlarged scarf To Handle shows a range of existing scarfs in a sorting bin (the image first featured in magazine Vrij Nederland in 2013). The other three wall textiles, somewhat smaller scarfs, are usually characterized by some transparency and lightness, the various recordings of both photoshoots were placed on top of each other in the original photos, creating an illusion of movement, as if the images show the gestures by Scheltens and Abbenes while mixing colours and patterns. In their new guise, this idea of movement is regained in another way. The photosensitive paper is replaced by that which the images depict, the precious and fragile silk cloths, which subtly move when spectators pass by.

Literally was a way of coming full circle for Scheltens & Abbenes. The recycling of their own works, and returning to that which is depicted in the original photos, emphasizes the essence of their work: inviting people to look again and look more intensely at that which they have probably seen a thousand times before.