The Brooklyn Rail

“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is the phrase that neatly defines the drawing process of Joost Elffers. Ernst Haeckel’s motto was once a catchphrase of biologists, but it has been disproven scientifically, and now is embraced primarily by artists and designers who are enamored with the aesthetic side of the concept. A universal progression of morphological types that define the processes of growth and evolution: Elffers’s beings emerge from such an artistic chain of evolution. None of the works have titles or dates, but we are given a sense of their history and the sensibility behind their creation when we are informed that these were the progeny of pandemic loneliness and alienation. On view at the Embassy of the Free Mind (also known by the far sexier name of its library collection Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica [Library of Hermetic Philosophy]) in Amsterdam, the well-known book designer Elffers is exhibiting his drawings for the first time. They are a personal animal kingdom: dozens of studies of ethereal bulbous beings with enormous glassy eyes, differentiated by a wide variety of flippers, tails, fingers, genitalia, and even extra or alternate heads.

While they purport to represent extraterrestrial beings (the show does incorporate objects and illustrated books from the Embassy’s library of esoteric knowledge after all) these depictions are drawings more than anything else, and they are exercises in an almost ritual practice which follows a particular routine, but has built-in glitches which results in a variety of possible outcomes. Elffers draws his monochromatic sketches with Sakura Pigma Micron pens, extremely fine-tip, and that instrument yields a feathery etched texture, giving the figures a vibrating impermanent presence. Each drawing originates with a curved line, and these lines coalesce into a sphere, and from that basic geometry they become bio-morphic. Elffers either lets his drawn beings stay put at this stage, where they resemble multicellular organisms, or they grow into a variety of unnerving embryonic beings: think of the Navigators from David Lynch’s Dune. The result is a related family of creatures, a Linnean-like family tree—humanoid, animal-form, cellular, cosmological, or diagrammatic. These beings reside on gorgeous crinkly handmade paper whose ridges and nodes influence the path of the pen, allowing the appearance of the beings to follow the texture of the paper.

As a site for exhibiting Elffer’s visionary works, the Embassy of the Free Mind is a great match, with its vast library of esoteric and occult literature housed in a majestic canal house. One enters the exhibition space under the gaze of one of Elffer’s large beings. The first gallery space offers another three sizable alien profiles whose spherical eyes sink into their similarly circular heads like a hot coal melting through a bucket of snow. It is a face-off: across the room from the drawings are thirteen prints, enlarged illustrations from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617). Fludd’s etchings are circular as well: diagrams of the creation of the cosmos. Like Elffer’s drawings they resemble gigantic divine irises and pupils. There is one exception: the thirteenth Fludd etching is a black square colored in with tightly scribbled lines. It anchors the whole room with an originary void pregnant with possibilities. And so the two sets of eyes have a staring contest across a space streaming with light reflected from the canal, a real Johannes Vermeer vibe. The third wall facing the window has two neat rows of Elffers’s playful horned sea-horse beings, seacorns, their bodies’ “S” shape arising from the artist’s swirling technique. The repetitive forms with slight variations make one think of Ray Johnson and his eternal bunnies or Keith Haring and his vibrating rhythmic lines which seemed to pulse various forms and objects into existence. The next space is more cavernous and anchored by a gargantuan hearth topped with a lewd armorial. Original editions of masterpieces of occult literature, including Fludd’s, accompany the drawings in cases. One series of Elffers’s drawings offer a meticulously drawn parthenogenesis: one, two, and then three spheres rotating, multiplying, and bouncing within a void. Perhaps they are the progenitors of the larger aliens, or possible a whole species in their own right. Process takes priority in Elffers’s drawings: he yields the development of the piece to the spiraling energy of his gestures, a variation on automatic drawing. Released from the conscious control of the artist, Elffers’s beings don’t necessarily conform to our perception of proportion or visual pleasure. They take on uneasy top-heavy proportions or seem to develop pustules or pimples which are generated by the endless curves and convolutions of the artist’s freehand. But a pimple on one being becomes a sprouting cat’s head on another, or a horn, or second eye. A capacious hallway runs through the building, and here we become acquainted with Elffers’s whales—teardrop shaped leviathans. The whales seem to rotate with a motion reminiscent of the yinyang pattern: Elffers’s cetaceans inhabit the depths of the ocean, maybe the depths of Fludd’s square void, but swim through that forbidding space peaceably, emitting alien songs, that in this world of whirling kaleidoscope eyes, may indeed hail from off-planet.