The carnivalesque figures of Folkert de Jong are gruesome for eternity

It hides in our cavity walls, in floors and ceilings. It’s hidden in the refrigerator, in a car seat, and maybe even in the pillow you sleep on every night. The styrofoam and polyurethane foam with which the internationally successful artist Folkert de Jong has been casting, cutting and spraying his grotesque figures for over 25 years, is used in all sorts of ways in construction and industry.

This use is usually in an invisible place, but not with De Jong: in his often carnivalesque figures full of (art) historical references, the material plays the leading role: in bright, poisonous colors it drips and shoots in all directions – solidified, that is. but you feel that this material was once liquid foam.

Ministry of Fear/Foam Folkert de Jong named his major retrospective of 25 years of artistry, which can now be seen at Kunsthal Kade in Amersfoort. A reference to the movie Ministry of Fear (1944) by Fritz Lang, a director who, according to De Jong: “made films between the First and Second World Wars where you have the feeling: ‘Hey, something very dark is coming’.”

That dark feeling is at the heart of what makes De Jong’s sculptures so good and uncomfortable: on the one hand they are made from a very modern, cheap and economical material (some foams expand up to 40 times when you spray them on). On the other hand, the indegradability of the plastics makes these images horrifyingly for eternity. Like natural stone, but different.

Bright pink isolation cell

In the central hall of Kunsthal Kade, De Jong built a large scaffold over which you descend via three ‘rooms’ or platforms. De Jong’s latest work can also be seen from there, and that is a highlight. Purgatory (2023) is a bright pink room, an isolation cell as you often see in films, containing two equally pink Jheronimus Bosch-like fantasy figures. This is about the feeling of being locked up in your own head, De Jong explains in a video – the mirror in the back wall makes you part of that claustrophobic experience.

The museum rooms downstairs and the corridors around the central hall are populated by (many) more a Christ figure with two basketballs, two armed men around a BMW cut in half, Piet Mondrian with a feminist protest sign, monkeys with a top hat on pedestals and a terrifying blue self portrait (Trinity II2017) of the artist with his head bowed and his orange head twice in his hands.

The grid of history

Fascinating too Operation Harmony (2008): a huge soft pink grid structure in which ‘petroleum black’ bodies and body parts of historical figures such as Spinoza, Willem van Oranje and Balthazar Gerards are included. We are being pulled apart by history, De Jong seems to be saying, and our room for maneuver is limited.

Because there are no more specific descriptions per image, you regularly have to guess what exactly De Jong means by, for example, that feminist Mondrian (both want to change the world?). The inconvenience of sometimes rickety associations is not bad, it may be exactly the intention. The beautifully published catalog, with many private photos, promises to be more candid – although it lacks the break with two business partners in 2010, about which De Jong was frank earlier.

The cruelty of war, but also the temptation of destruction to which people fall time and again, are an important theme for De Jong. For example, above The Iceman Cometh (2001), the first large styrofoam installation, with which de Jong broke through at the time at an exhibition in Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam: a colorful parade of five battered military figures, in wheelchairs or with wooden legs, cross forward, smiling towards the abyss.

Standing next to it The Shooting… at Watou (2006): A crouching giant soldier in signature candy pink and blue, with several man-sized soldiers holding balionetted weapons. It is grim, seductive and enigmatic. The only thing you would have allowed these statues to be just a little more space, because that giant soldier is meant to snuggle up against the ceiling, but the other fighters are arranged a bit messy. The same happens to the historical heads on pedestals totemism (2016): somewhat ungrateful against a back wall.

In the (nicely chemically smelling) catalog many of the sculptures are arranged in a more beautiful, more spacious way at other locations – and there you also see that De Jong has made many more impressive sculptures. De Jong’s gruesome oeuvre deserved a more spacious jacket.