The exhibition of Pieter Laurens Mol’s work is overflowing with imaginative finds ★★★★★

Sometime in the late 1960s, Pieter Laurens Mol (75) rose from his ashes. Not literally of course – it was not Laurens Mol – the man who was unharmed by the fire, as if he were a phoenix or that monster from Stranger Things. Laurens Mol-the artist, he rose from his ashes.

It is recalled in Tuesday February 20, 1968 (1968), an installation consisting of the photograph of a fire and a shoe polish-like can. That can turns out to be an urn. It contains the ashes of the paintings that the young Laurens Mol burned that night (the photo): during his debut exhibition in Breda, the works had not garnered the hoped-for reactions and by setting fire to them, Mol thought he could make a new start. That act (and its registration) was the seed of his conceptually oriented work, and, indirectly, for the exhibition now on view at the Stedelijk Museum Breda, night flight.

This exhibition is by far the best I’ve seen in recent years. Everything about it is right: from the design to the selection to the audio tour narrated by Mol himself (with poetic flair). There is work from all phases of Mol’s career, which has been unjustly underexposed in our country; pieces that differ so much in technique, material and format that they sometimes appear to be made by different artists. What makes them recognizable as typical Pieter Laurens Mols is the playfulness they testify, the humor and curiosity, the shared themes. Here we see Mol’s dark side: all the work has to do with the night and the dark.

Mol turns out to be a night owl. He has been fascinated by darkness all his life. In his twenties he walked through Breda at night with a large painting of an Andrew’s cross, as if he were a living location arrow. About ten years later, when he lived in Amsterdam, he shot a light image of a sleeping woman into space – a light image that still shines through the cosmos, if it has not collided with an asteroid in the meantime.

Later still, he came under the grip of inner darkness, witness melancholy photo works such as inertia (1979), although we must be careful not to equate Laurens Mol’s artistic alter egos with the man himself. At other times he was in awe of the darkness, as seen in the section on the overwhelming and inspiring side of the universe.

The exhibition is overflowing with imaginative finds, and this part the most. A saddle to ride the moon, a light that glows on Lamp Black paint. Many of Mol’s works are conceptual in the best sense of the word: they are only completed in the mind of the viewer. Double Parasite (1988), for example, looks like a conventional woodcut of the starry sky, until you realize that the white in it was created by woodworms that perforated the plank: not gas nebulae but wormholes created this firmament.

On the drawing Mining my mind (1985) it is then again the head of the artist himself where the action begins. In dark lines Mol shows how he mines the depths of his mind, as if it were a diamond mine. Looking at such work, I lose my mind for words that do justice to this layered, slowly revealing art. Mining the mind, mind the mind: both artists and critics cannot avoid groping in the dark.

But the dark, this exhibition shows, does not have to be an end point: it is also a new beginning. At least that’s how I interpret the photo of a bunch of brightly colored eggs in a scorched nest in a burned-down landscape (Imminent Tempest, 1999). Where white contains all colours, there black contains the potential of all colors. That potential is more than realized in this exceptional exhibition.