In a society that is increasingly progress - and youth - orientated, death seems to become a taboo.
The focus of my work consists of layers and linkages of the histories that have been etched,trapped and stratified in the soil of the earth.
Millions of creatures and human beings have come and gone and
have become one with the land they once lived on.
I am interested in creating a unity of opposites that constitutes our world.
Dead and alive.
It means “field of reed”
For quite some time now, religion has been losing favour with the Dutch. Up until the mid 1950’s, religion still was ubiquitous in The Netherlands. It showed in the powerful position held by the clergy in society, the architectural dominance of public spaces by churches and in art: The Bible was the main source of inspiration for artists. Nowadays, clerical real estate and religious objects are increasingly used for profane ends.With a series of objects titled “A Dieu l’enfance”, Victor Sonna refers both to a past in which religion and art were intimately entwined but also to the slow distancing process between them. In this process, desecration/destruction is always the source of new acts of signification.
A skin is smooth on the outside and rugged on the inside. Our past and present are two sides of the same coin. We carry our individual pasts with us wherever we go, while also having a past shared with others as a group, family or nation,both aspects influencing the present.
Why, after the great artists, do people ever try to do anything again?
Great Art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, neverthless I think that they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning facts on to the system in a more violent way.
In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy.
I eat nature in order to live and to live, nature eats me in return
Neither nature nor I actually die. There is only a merging, a mutual transformation.
When I was seven years old, I had to face death as the inevitable closure of the cycle of life. My father died around that time and my mother was trying to find a way out for my brothers and me. She decided to ‘stall’ each of us with members of my family.
In the distorting Mirror of Life, reality appears as it really is. The damaged life is displayed by means of everyday utilities. Everything around us can just as easily breakdown, change or disappear altogether.
Acension is often a metaphor for the here and now in all its manifestations, not backing down from daring to ask vital questions and confronting us with the beauty of imperfection and mortality.