Steef Crombach

Although my work radiates a resolute materiality in a firm shape, my approach to the world is poetic and very speculative. I question the status of objects and situations. In my work I deal with these concrete manifestations by adding an almost identical second layer to them. In this way I unscrew the anchor points in our perception. I have trouble navigating through my direct environment. This because I don’t automatically safe, categorize and make a habit out of daily life. I will never put my keys in the same spot and I will never learn to read the analog clock. I don’t know where to put more attention towards and where less. I can stare myself blind on the pattern of a carpet, or those funny patterns you see in public transport. Dealing with this constant struggle to grasp what’s daily in life forms the base of my research for my visual art. I am constantly trying to grasp my environment and the time I live in. What are the most common car colors, common colors of houses and the favorite colors of people around us. Once I collect and picked out these fragments of information, I safe them in my memory consciously. This is our environment. This is how it looks like. A lot of things that come forward in my research are the things that shape our environment, should make it easy to navigate thru and make it seem neutral. By showing the end result of my struggle I feel like I enable people to see what’s going on, to see which aspects of our present time will be part of our collective memory when we look back.