Cees Post

Cees Post (1942) makes small, constructivist works of art that you can wear on clothing, but that also come into their own in a display case. He calls them 'object jewellery'. Minimal Art, with a refined interplay of lines that you have to take a close look at. Worn as jewelry, the lines come to life through the movement. The shiny silver contributes to that. Cees Post trained as a gold and silversmith in Schoonhoven, where he already made his first abstract-geometric jewelery in 1958. At the Free Academy in The Hague he trained in graphic design. There he developed his abstract lines to great heights, but then on paper. In those years he felt related to the 'pure art' of the Zero artists. His first jewelery exhibition in 1982, twenty years after leaving Schoonhoven, marked the start of a serious resumption of goldsmithing for him. One jewelry exhibition after another followed and his fame grew. In 1990 his work was selected for the major Benelux exhibition 'Contemporary jewelery art 1990' and in 2000 he designed the Wilhelminaring, the national oeuvre prize that is awarded every two years to a prominent sculptor. Straight lines of silver and sleek geometric shapes are characteristic of his work. Rectangles, triangles or squares, spatially or in the plane, with staggered, shifting or wavy lines. Diagonal lines that suggest depth, but evoke an opposing force through a change of direction. Optical effects are created by shifting and jumping. It is always an investigation into the geometric form in all its variations. The compositions are not created according to a pre-imposed number system, but completely emotionally. The graphic effects are best expressed in silver (oxidized, shiny or matte). Post occasionally uses matted yellow gold as a counter form or demarcation. Silver is not easy to transform into a tight pattern. This requires great technical and craft skills. Post tries to achieve the highest attainable perfection. The distance between the silver bars must be accurate to one tenth of a millimetre. In Post's work a development towards an ever further limitation of the means of form is striking. For the last ten years, Cees Post has worked almost exclusively with the square as a basis, within which he sets his lines. Post: 'For me, a square is both an anchor point and a challenge in my search for beauty. The square is my frame of mind'. It is precisely this self-imposed limitation that forces us to deepen our understanding. Within the s