Nederlandse regering in Londen in ballingschap Possibly 1944 - 1948

This document was made by Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy, maybe around the time it was issued. It appears to be a kind of wartime communication, a set of instructions perhaps. I am really drawn to the surface of this document. You can see the words, printed in dense, dark ink, but there's also a sense of layering, of things being crossed out or covered up. The marks obscure and interrupt the text, creating a kind of visual noise. I find myself focusing on these abstract shapes as much as the content of the message. It seems like a record of something very specific, but it's also full of secrets and silences. This feels like an eerie cousin to the work of someone like Cy Twombly, who used text and scrawls to create these layered, poetic surfaces. Both artists seem interested in the way language can be both a tool for communication and a kind of abstract material, something to be manipulated and played with. Art is like that, an ongoing conversation, a game of call and response across time.