An adult man cuddling intimately with a large fish: at first glance it looks almost moving. But appearances are deceiving. This still living fish, above water, is literally being cuddled to death. It is one of the contemporary video installations in the exhibition Signed, nature in the Utrecht Central Museum. With the movie, Oh Peixe (‘The Fish’), creator Jonathas de Andrade depicts a fictional ritual of a Brazilian fishing village along the Amazon. The fishermen there live in harmony with their environment – they kill solely to eat, and do so through a loving but fatal embrace for the fish.
How different is that a few rooms away: also a recent video work, Broken Spectre by the American artist Richard Mosse, also about the Amazon rainforest, but not nearly as lovely. Here, hallucinatory close-ups of fluorescent lichens are quickly followed by images of burning forests and depressing black-and-white vistas with thousands of cows in a denuded forest, accompanied by a soundtrack of claustrophobic techno drone.
Two visions on the relationship between man and nature that could hardly be more different. Ecological intimacy versus economic coldness. It shows the versatility of the exhibition, in which the complex relationship with our natural environment is central.
Leo (Leendert) Gestel: Showery weather (landscape near Montfoort)1909.
Photo Adriaan van Dam, Centraal Museum Utrecht Collection
The urgency increases with each room
Signed, nature starts close to home: the first rooms show highlights from the Munnicks van Cleeff collection, with landscape drawings of the Utrecht region from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This initially makes it feel tame and trivial – nice, that interior of the Dom Church, drawn by Pieter Saenredam, but a bit far-fetched in an exhibition about nature. But with each room the urgency increases and the view becomes wider and wider: we zoom out to the Netherlands and the rest of the world.
Hendrikus van de Sande Bakhuyzen: Self-portrait painting in a meadow landscape with cattle1850.
Image Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Ultimately, you wander through an eclectic collection of old and new art, from man versus wolf in sixteenth-century paintings to twentieth-century advertising posters for the ANWB and for ‘ancient fertilizer’ chili saltpeter. The techniques are also diverse: charcoal drawings, old wallpaper, videos and Delft blue tiles. Grasses immortalized in ‘sunlight print’ cyanotype hang just steps away from silk dresses full of botanical patterns. Big names like Mondriaan (with a subdued birch forest painting) are placed next to unknown or long-forgotten artists.
This multitude could be overwhelming, as if everything has been randomly pulled out, but grouped around subthemes such as ‘death’ and ‘order’, the museum pieces reinforce each other. They show that the relationship between humans and nature has always been complicated, albeit on a much smaller scale than in Broken Spectre. Some works you just keep looking at – for example the impressive canvas El ruido del hombre (‘The Noise of Man’) on which the Colombian Nohemí Pérez has embroidered colorful dead animals in the middle of a black forest: a call to restore lost life. In this way, the exhibition shows, without being moralistic, how careful we should be with nature. Or as that one early twentieth-century ANWB poster puts it:
“Do not leave the owner of the forest the peels and the boxes as a thank you for the pleasant rest.”
Nicholas Wicart: ‘t Dorp Leersum (verso)18th century.
Image Atlas Munnicks van Cleeff
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