Pieter Laurens Mol

Ultimatum, 1981

Central qualities of Pieter Laurens Mol’s work since the 1960s are poetry and irony, undertones of melancholy and existential questions, which he initially implements, repeatedly referring to Traditions of Dutch Art. In his early, conceptual photographic works and series, the artist himself appears in implied role-plays that stage metaphorically understood terms such as instability and falling, loss and search. The diptych Ultimatum places a duo of rural furniture—it is reminiscent of the simple tables and chairs that van Gogh made the protagonists of his pictures—next to a self-portrait of the artist. The lower body is cropped from the edge of the picture and inextricably separated from the reflection of the upper body in the puddle. Here too: one thinks of the famous self-portrait of van Gogh, who seems to be dragging his long shadow laboriously behind him on a field path (Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, lost).