Robert Kleyn, "Soap," 2015-present, video still, 3:07 min. (courtesy of Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver)
During the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, there's one thing we've come to know much more intimately – soap.
So Vancouver artist Robert Kleyn's ongoing project, almost 200 images documenting bars of soap, seems timely in this era of obsessive hand washing.
Kleyn actually began the project in 2015, after renting a studio on the Downtown East Side. The entrance was from a laneway he says was as "filthy as any place I've ever been."
His ritual of hand washing before settling down to work sparked the idea. He started with photographs, but eventually moved to digital scans.
"When handling soap, we become unwitting sculptors," he says. "Soap shaped by our hands and the forces of our bodies becomes unwittingly a deformation that is subtle, gradual, almost unnoticeable. There is no method to this, at least no conscious one."
The series is a nod to Francis Ponge, a French writer who described common objects in prose poems. One of those items was soap, which he used as as an allegory for life under the wartime Vichy regime.
"Ponge describes soap and its use as if he were seeing it for the first time so that it becomes an allegory for spiritual survival in a poisonous world," says Kleyn.
Kleyn, who has lived and worked in Rome and New York, is an architect who specializes in art-related projects. His video, Soap, is posted on the homepage of Vancouver's Monica Reyes Gallery as part of a series about artists during the coronavirus pandemic. ■
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