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A flattened little train runs back and forth. Not on the ground, but - as an almost reduced three dimensionality - vertically along the wall at eye level. The train turns out not to be a train. It is an LCD monitor which functions as a window. Through the window can be seen a synthetic, digitalised panorama. Once at the end of the rails, the motor reverses and the little LCD runs back. The movement of the landscape is reversed as well. The video signal, the monitor and the motor are powered by wipers. It is reminiscent of a toy electric train. Jaap de Jonge: ''The concept has something boyish about it, something childish. Sometimes I make conceptual works, and then something baroque. Now I have made something playful.'' The landscape is empty. There are digitalised images of shots made of Mars from unmanned spacecraft. Rocks and sky, in between as a dividing line the horizon. Jaap de Jonge stresses that there is no divine inspiration behind this installation: ''It is a simple concept, a visual idea that I have tried to design with as little hotch-potch as possible. The technology is present, but fulfills a subsidiary role and doesn't add any new elements to the original idea.'' There is no philosophical message or political thought behind the piece. De Jonge: ''You could think of the emptiness of the landscape as the emptiness of technique, but I find that a bit far fetched. I hope that the work speaks for itself and that the public finds themselves having to smile when they look at it. I try to design visual concepts so that they can be read as such, be recognisable. Like the signs at a station; symbols that everyone understands. People often want to know what I mean, and they are very disappointed when I tell them how simply I have thought about it. But that's exactly what I consider to be one of the strong points of my work. I make works of art that nobody is waiting for. That is the point of it for me: designing pointless things and pointless images and pointless ideas too. Just doing it becomes an Explanation. That's why I became an artist, because I'm not at all good at expressing things verbally.''
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Eric van ‘t Groenewout
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