Kalenderblad voor april tot en met juni 1923 1922

Curator: This artwork, titled "Kalenderblad voor april tot en met juni 1923," is a drawing in ink on paper from 1922, created by Leo Visser. It blends art nouveau with what one might call fantasy art, depicting a calendar integrated within an aquatic scene. Editor: My initial reaction is that it's surprisingly soothing. The color palette is so muted, almost monochromatic, like looking at something through old, slightly fogged glass. It evokes a dreamy underwater world, somehow. Curator: The symbolic language employed here is very striking, isn't it? Fish, often representing transformation and the subconscious, are a dominant motif. Note how they’re arranged geometrically around the calendar months. Each little fish seems poised to leap into the flow of time. Editor: Definitely a calming, repetitive element—those geometric structures seem designed to regulate chaos and perhaps control our relationship with temporality itself. But look closer— the face of the fish, emerging from a churning sea—it feels so alert, intelligent, yet trapped. Like consciousness peering through limitations, yearning. Curator: A pertinent observation. Consider too the way the piece is framed, teeming with more aquatic life. There’s a tension here between the constraints of the calendar – rigid and rational - and the organic, boundless nature represented by the sea. Visser is engaging with archetypes of the wild, the primordial. It harkens back to an animistic vision. Editor: I see what you mean; the calendar becomes this imposed structure on what's essentially a teeming, vital world, an attempt to map the unknowable. Yet it has its own strange kind of beauty too. It almost suggests our need to measure, predict, even dominate is inherent, like this urge is coded deep into our awareness. The way time organizes even the most fantastical creation – ironic somehow. Curator: Precisely. Even decorative arts and fantasy reflect underlying power structures that determine not only artistic choices but cultural narratives and temporal anxieties. Editor: It definitely got me thinking, or should I say feeling, time differently, in seeing time enmeshed in images we associate to different planes of understanding and perception. Thank you. Curator: Yes. It offers an intriguing peek into the symbolic universe our ancestors once inhabited. The blend between practical function and deeply symbolic representation renders the calendar a fascinating artifact to contemplate.