Juul Kraijer Overview

The eloquence of my drawings I can't match with words. In spite of this, I'm asked so regularly and with such persistence to give a specific explanation, that I don't want to refuse out rightly doing so. I have consciously not chosen a text written by others because of the risk that their interpretation might become canonized by virtue of inclusion in this book. Personally, I shrink back from interpreting my work, considering the fact that the meaning of a drawing is always ambiguous. If it were unambiguous, I would have chosen a more direct form than the poetic-associative one of visual art. Visual art is a good medium for giving sharp definition to that which, due to its not being finite, cannot be captured in language and theory. Interpreting a drawing, as soon as it's done with some certainty, deforms into the dictating of a meaning, whereby one artificially restricts the work, amputating the other possibilities in favour of that single one. With the words that I add to the drawings I will attempt to plant a signpost. Not one that indicates the one and only correct direction, but one pointing to many paths like on a nine-track crossroads, where you never know which path you have already walked or from which path you actually came, and nevertheless get to see acres of beautiful forest.
And keep in mind that an artist whose work is characterized so much by deception will probably not avoid it in her writing either.

The drawings are in no way portrayals of real situations. They are rather embodied frames of mind, literally incarnated by Japanese looking girls. They use the form of the emblem; a concise combined play of elements that bring a metaphor into being which gives the portrayal its significance. The conciseness here is of vital importance. In drawing, it is conciseness and restraint that form the guiding principle, a guiding principle which I don't seem to have chosen, but which appears to be dictated by the drawings themselves. It proves a condicio sine qua non, in its role as opposite, as complementary, as the one statement of a contradiction.