source: tamaravansanorg
“I first met Tamara Van San in 2007 during preparations for an exhibition. I happened to be in the garden of the museum when the artist pulled up in a large van from which she and three men lifted a very heavy polyurethane sculpture, carried it fifty metres and then put it down on the grass. The one-and-a-half-metre-high sculpture represented a cloud but resembled a clenched fist. Both the person and the sculpture radiated a mixture of sensuality and strength. In subsequent years I met and talked to Van San several times, usually with reference to sculptural installations or exhibitions. For instance, I was at the S.M.A.K. in March 2010 when her in situ sculpture ‘The Wandering Tuba Method’ was shown to Panamarenko. He described the work as “not bad” and spent a long time looking at it. Again it was a strange combination of gracefulness and robustness. Elongated, polyurethane shapes covered in pink nylon were wound and knotted around reinforcing rods which were affixed to wall or ceiling just with a few screw eyes. It was a sober and striking, sensitive and poetic piece. I was also very impressed by the solo show at Galerie Tatjana Pieters, now one-and-a-half years ago, where she showed exclusively sculptures made with epoxy and pigment. In recent years her oeuvre has gradually developed by experimenting with a succession of different materials. Having made mostly polyurethane and plaster sculptures for a while, she then concentrated on ceramics for several years. After that she worked with epoxy for a year. For this exhibition she wants to try and bring together in poetic harmony a number of works created in the last ten years. “I have also made several new sculptures using paper and silicones,” she told me recently, “but I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with them yet. I would love to be able to show that the materials I used are very important, but that what really matter are the forms, their newness and the way they claim a place for themselves and their maker.” And she added laughing: “And for you and the other spectators, of course.” I can’t help it, but I feel great admiration for this wilful woman and her unpredictable, over-the-top sculptures. It never fails to surprise me that they can be light-footed and dark, elegant and hard, poetic and sobering all at the same time… What we seem to experience in this work is an encounter between the sublime and the earthly, which is achieved in seemingly simple, but always unusual forms. The themes are implicit in the way the materials are used. The sculptures appear to comment on what it means to make a sculpture. The world is revealed to us in a new, contemporary manner. Several authors have aptly pointed out that as a child Van San travelled and sailed a lot and that she now regularly goes diving. This work seems to breathe freely, you sense a determination and daring which go beyond the provincial. You feel the opulence of the nature, the architecture, the astronomy. You sense a belief in art as a survival weapon and as a window on a changeable, ever-surprising world. This is magnanimous work, made for people who have both feet firmly on the ground, but are not afraid to dream.” Carla Van Campenhout
translated into English by Alison Mouthaan-Gwillim
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source: tamaravansan
Het werk van Tamara Van San heeft weinig baat bij geschreven bijsluiters. Beeldende kunst verwijst vaak naar ander beeldmateriaal, achterliggende boodschappen of voorziet de geschiedenis van het eigen medium van commentaar. De vormen van Van San zwijgen eerder, maar intrigeren net daarom heel fel. Het kunstwerk dat aan zichzelf en zijn eigen logica genoeg heeft om te bestaan en te betoveren, staat bij Van San centraal. Henri Laurens zei ooit dat beeldhouwkunst niet meer is dan het in bezit nemen van ruimte. Het is maar de vraag of Van Sans werk het klassieke label verdraagt. Bovendien lijken haar creaties eerder organische te evolueren dan dat ze die zouden willen inpalmen. Werken in keramiek zijn een nieuwe ontwikkeling in haar oeuvre, na een residence in het Europees keramisch werkcentrum in ‘s Hertogenbosch. Hoezeer haar sculpturen ook voor zichzelf spreken, toch schrijft ook deze kunstenares een eigen verhaal over het kunstwerk en zijn verhouding tot een omgeving, deze keer een klein stadscentrum. Met een heel eigen, bijna freewheelend gebaar ent ze haar creaties ook op de gevel van het vernieuwde stadhuis.
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source: tamaravansan
‘In a culture that tends to privilege the visual over other senses, whilst insidiously championing watching over seeing, it is common for the eye to be allowed to skip lightly across the surface of things, content to quickly pick-up linguistic or associative clues from which to form a succession of sufficient meanings. In adaptive evolution this ability to quickly assess and judge situations of threat or opportunity is a cognitive triumph. The casualty of this tendency toward high-speed looking is the delight to be found in sustained, questioning scrutiny. 
Using a palette that belongs very much to the high-speed contemporary high street, Van San is nonetheless able to delay the transmission of superficial meaning for long enough, and with enough verve, to allow the viewer to look afresh at the works before them, and to find within these works new networks of meaning that privilege the eye but work in concert with the mind.
Van San’s sculptures, made specifically for LIDO’s gallery space and for the beach front outside, do not toy with linguistic or pictorial systems, but their heightened colour and catholic materiality serve to delay the work from quietly retiring to the territory of pure form. However, with time, it is form that emerges as the primary force in these sculptures. Allowing the works to resolve themselves through the process of their own making, and at all times keeping the tendency toward decentred chaos at bay, Van San arranges coloured forms in space that attain a harmonic, if temporary, order – an order that suppresses its constituent materiality’s potential to upstage the whole.
She achieves a formal sophistication in her work without recourse to dry or well rehearsed technique. Instead, by sailing close to the wind in her embrace of the language and material of the everyday, she is able to transform the familiar, revealing a space of visual delight and complexity that exists beneath the semiotically vociferous surface.’