For Ritual 302 coordinate JE BAAK records the characteristics of the artworks of Mondrian from different positions and perspectives in order to deconstruct the master’s absolute artistic values of proportion, color, and line, and turns them into patternized relative values. Paradoxically, however, this process returns to a search for the absolute value and remains a performative recording and symbolic act. Mondrian’s work, in this process, functions as a coordinate axis upon which we can find our position of existence. Taking a perspective is a way of setting up one’s own relationship with Mondrian’s absolute values. Patternization created through the repetition of images, is not unlike a state of the “absence of self,” reached through a repetitive process of replication and division.
