Since the early nineties, Mooij (Rotterdam, 1958) has looked to the street as a stage for his work. Typical of his generation, including artists like Joep van Lieshout and Jeroen Doorenweerd, is that they connected their work with the world outside the walls of the gallery space. That often led to confusion: was this really visual art? In 1999, Mooij was nominated for the Rotterdam Design Prize with his DJ Mobile: a converted Ford Sierra with a professional sound system, ten speakers and a DJ booth. But to the good viewer it has always been clear: Mooij’s work is firmly rooted in the sculptural tradition.
At the basis of sculpture lies the artist’s ability to suggest life in dead matter. Olaf Mooij’s cars are nothing more than bodywork, but he has transformed them into personalities, into living matter. Through the addition of exaggerated hairstyles, hairpieces or the enlargement of parts, caricatural images materialize. The humorous images relativize the contemporary relationship of the human being to machines and the devices that surround him. The universal phenomenon of the love object is playfully ridiculed, as in the Chesterfield Car which looks as inviting as a real Chesterfield couch (2004, collection Museum Boijmans van Beuningen).
In the series of works he exhibited in TENT, Mooij appears to want to return to the absolute autonomy of sculpture. His car images no longer have functional use, but serve only as a reminder of the car’s mode of transport. The works stand, lie, hang and lean in the exhibition space. They have been placed on the ground without a pedestal, and without their practical value they look very vulnerable. The skin, the surface of the car, is the focal point. The skin of what once could have been an estate car lies folded out on the ground. A Volkswagen form lies unstable on the floor, its surface covered with a black stone-like layer. The work presents itself as a fossil remnant of a distant past. A small car form is spanned by a yellowish membrane from which it appears to be breaking free; the suggestion of a birth is induced. End and beginning, before and after: this dead matter is biomorph, the resemblance of living beings. Mooij’s sculptures have a strong tactile appearance: they invite you to touch them and, oh, why not, to love them.