Precursor of the museum as the institution we know today, the Wunderkammer – or cabinet de curiosité, was traditionally a room where a collection of remarkable objects belonging to natural history, geology, and religion were displayed. Pieter Laurens Mol (Breda, 1946) created his new solo exhibition at April in Paris, Zalmneusje (et cetera) / Salmon Nose (et cetera), as a Wunderkamer of works spanning his career.

In this cabinet of wonders, the artworks organically bind with one another and their surroundings, finding common ground and a fine sparkling new energy from their subtle connections. Supported by a playful and associative curatorial approach, various holistic themes spontaneously emerge, highlighting cardinal concepts which throughout the years have held a special meaning for the Dutch-born artist.

The exhibition contains a selection of works spanning five decades of practice with a special focus on the 60’s/early 70’s pieces. These early works, in particular, reveal the open-mindedness and ambition of a young Pieter Laurens Mol, who grew up in the provincial environment, to carve out his space in the international art scene.

As a fervent observer of the world, Pieter Laurens Mol has always been working with the ambiguously existential concepts in our folklore traditions, anthropology, and philosophy. The work varies from figurative to abstract, with an ageless narrative, ideas from the macro to the micro, from rural life all the way up to that of space travel. Mol manages to capture our reality with poetic intuition and conscious playfulness.
Thanks to an impressive variety of media, languages, concepts, and techniques, the exhibition chalks out a figure of the visionary artist, his immaculate vocation, and his everlasting curiosity.

The work titled “Aurora (Broodlicht)” is from the 70’s and consists of a real light shining from within a charcoaled loaf of bread set on a small stool serving as a table. The morning breaks as the bread, as the pitted fruit suggesting a rebirth or new beginning.

In the work Zonder Titel (Gesprokkelde Nachten) / Untitled (Gleaned Nights), from 1985, which is made up of a group of different sized black rods, bundled together in a light-fast bag (used by photographers to protect their film in the field), a poetic image emerges. The title, which with a play on words, suggests a bunch of rays of darkness gleaned as wheat after the harvest looks like beams of dark sprouting from their container.

A friendly cloud of bright small colored pencil drawings framed in tiny white frames hangs next to a list of titles jutting out of the wall on a A4 sized white sheet of paper typed up with a typewriter. Zonder Titel (Zalmneusje) / Untitled (Salmon Nose) from 1974, which is also the title work of the exhibition, blurs the line between the human and non-human, dictating the human condition onto objects and animals, using language as a crowbar. Literally translated as “the nose of the salmon”, this Dutch expression stands for “the best of the best” and is a prime example of the importance that titles hold in Mol’s practice. By disrupting the existing parameters of our reality, Pieter Laurens Mol transforms the ordinary in extra-ordinary.