Contemporary crudeness at RAUWER

Feb 22, 2013 | by Laura | Art, Event

About the author

Laura is a 25 year old nonpracticing psychologist. As a hopeless romantic she loves to write, dream and wander around the city looking for new adventures and inspirations. Stay tuned for an inside peek into the daily life of one of Amsterdam's inhabitants!

In a world where creativity is just a mouse click away, it has become more and more difficult to recognize genuine talent. These modern times have brought us numerous foolproof devices which have awoken little artists in all of us. The times where only practised photographers with expensive gear could make accurate representations of reality is long gone. Nowadays you can shoot a high resolution photo and make it look like it was developed in the ’50s with just a tab on your smartphone. And if you need some background information, you’re just milliseconds away from finding out how cave paintings evolved into the Renaissance.

Modernization is a bitch

A friend of mine once said that the facilitation of the use of artistic techniques or the ready-to-use-knowledge we read on Wikipedia doesn’t necessarily lead to greater human creativity. After spending a whole night reading the entire history of the remote control, he concluded that these recent developments might reduce the chances of generating something of your own, something authentic, and thus being truly creative. Maybe it’s time to rethink why we need all this modernization in the first place. Maybe, we need to head back to where it all once started, back to our desires and intuitions, back to the moment when art was about a piece of paper and a charcoal.

Returning to our fundamental principles, where humble techniques like analogue photography and primary colours offer us some peace and harmony in this artistic jungle.

That’s exactly what the artists from RAUWER had in mind. Returning to our fundamental principles, where humble techniques like analogue photography and primary colours offer us some peace and harmony in this artistic jungle. With their brand new headquarters on the Van Woustraat, PUP concepts exposes the personal representation of rawness of 15 different artists. Expect analogue snapshots from private collections, pencil drawings of the naked body and black and white photos of solitary landscapes. Unwrought, crude and intriguing art, that’s surprisingly refreshing in a very approachable way.

If you too are fed up with airbrush and the clone stamp tool, head out to PUP to rediscover your instincts and find some pure art. And while you’re at it, take an Instagram to post on Facebook so your friends can see how awesome you are.