Fransje Killaars at Galerie de Expeditie - Amsterdam

Since the early `90s, commercial fabrics have been Fransje Killaars's medium. Many of her works involve intensely colored fringed bedspreads that are woven to her specifications. A particularly large and dazzling arrangement of these cloths, draped over mattresses set upon rug fragments, was recently on view at the Stedelijk Museum as part of a show of anticipated acquisitions. The accumulation of brilliant hues in simple but densely repeated geometric patterns made her entry a showstopper.

Concurrently at Expeditie, Killaars offered a smaller installation with some additional implications. Three twin-size mattresses were grouped together in a U that opened toward a double mattress under a canopy of black mosquito netting. All the beds were covered in heavy woven cloths, which brought to mind old-fashioned Dutch table rugs or Middle Eastern seating carpets in their thick tactility, but not in their arrays of neon colors usually configured in squares or rectangles. The installation's hierarchical arrangement might suggest a royal court as well as a family grouping. But the optical trumped all: the entire display was enclosed in a bright green mesh of the gauge and openness of basketball nets. Looking through it as you circled the installation added a disorienting moire.

The gallery's small second room presented a half-dozen wall works of Killaars's other characteristic format, a loose-hanging rectangle made up of seven or more horizontal stripes of various fabrics. These works, paintings of a sort, may consist of single rectangles, a pair or a trio. Some fabrics and colors repeat, some conjunctions seem to be chromatic developments (e.g., a brown pattern on green gives way to a brown fabric) and some seem to operate in contrasts. Yet no real plotting can be discerned, and the fabrics range from solid-color satins to jacquard patterns to netted laces, again with no obvious rationale.

You try to puzzle it out: is it a culture or an era or a matter of personal taste that's suggested by floor seating or floor sleeping as well as fabrics that jump from delicate to garish? Killaars emphasized the question by closing her show with two doll-houses "papered" and "carpeted" with the same curious, uncompromising array of fabrics, the strong colors and the large scale of the prints inappropriate in any conventional "decorating" sense. Killaars embraces design, cultural analysis, psychology of perception and color theory, and her work burns into your eyeballs and your memory.

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