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Chantal Rens
Big in Japan, Big at Pony Bookshop. Or... how we like Chantal's collage works.
Who's Chantal?
Chantal Rens (1981, Etten-Leur) received her BFA at the Academie voor Beeldende Vorming in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Her work consists mainly of analog collages with photography as a starting point and books she designs and publishes herself under the label PANTOFLE BOOKS, the independent publishing house she founded in 2014 together with Dutch cartoonist and artist Gummbah.
In general her works can be described as uncanny, funny, sometimes unsettling, with playful interventions that challenge what you are seeing. Rens wants to protect her work against the usual analyses, rational considerations and comparisons. Her motto is rather: let yourself be carried away with wonder, be open to the unusual. Her works do their utmost to provide nutrition for the requested attitude.
2016-2018
Her book YOU RUN AROUND TOWN LIKE A FOOL AND YOU THINK THAT IT’S GROOVY – a collection of 100 collages of animals balancing alcoholic drinks on their backs – was said to be ‘perhaps the most unnecessary but absolutely the most funny book of 2016′.
In 2018 she made two books: COMMON SENSE IS A HUNGY BITCH – an array of 50 collages surrounded by carefully juxtaposed spot colours and Various Animals – a board book with 12 full-page collaged photographs of weird and wonderful animals.
THAT’S WHEN WALLS ARE THIN was published with edition Taube in 2020: a limited edition folder with fifteen prints based on a series of analog cut-and-paste collages comprised of monochrome material extracted from Dutch magazines of the 1930s through the 1960s. The collages might induce a nostalgic yearning for a simpler world that does not exist. Yet the temporal displacement is a reminder that nothing was ever perfect, and it never will be.
In 2022 the second volume of YOU RUN AROUND TOWN LIKE A FOOL AND YOU THINK THAT IT’S GROOVY came out, titled YOU RUN AROUND TOWN LIKE A FOOL AND YOU THINK THAT IT’S GROOVY 2 with one hundred new animals and liquor.
2020-2022
foto : Jesper Janse