Ontwerp voor een tapijt met spitse en krullende vormen 1920 - 1930

Curator: Dirk Verstraten's "Ontwerp voor een tapijt met spitse en krullende vormen," a watercolor from the 1920s. It’s a design, as the title suggests, for a carpet. Editor: Well, isn't that fabulous! My first thought is... fireworks? It's as if some celestial explosion got caught in a spiderweb. The color choices are wonderfully odd. Curator: Absolutely! The dynamic, radial composition immediately grabs the eye, doesn't it? The swirling forms suggest a certain Art Deco influence; there’s that period’s love of dynamism and the exotic in here. But it also reminds me of some wild kind of flower in full bloom. Editor: I see what you mean by Art Deco, with that streamlined extravagance and geometry playing nicely together. But if it is a flower, then it's been dreamt up by someone after too much absinthe, all those strange curling edges set against that smoky gray ground. It's almost unnerving, that contrast! What’s the background doing? Curator: The background certainly functions as more than mere negative space. It flattens the picture plane and allows those spiky, swirling shapes to almost leap off the surface. Semiotically, the piece presents an interesting tension. It promises comfort and warmth with its intention as a carpet, but the stark color contrast and abstract shapes generate visual unrest. Editor: Unrest! Precisely! I bet this was intended for some decadent salon where flappers would do the Charleston on it, fueled by who-knows-what! What is interesting to me is how the symmetry sort of fights its own unraveling. Curator: Exactly, it is decorative art, but of an extremely interesting kind. Think of those evenings, now dust, then vibrant – illuminated on Verstraten’s impossible carpet. Editor: It is almost melancholic, considering it never fulfilled its purpose... but isn't it lovely as it is. What an unusual dance between the ordered and the chaotic.