Jan J. Schoonhoven

T 87-70, 1987

J. J. Schoonhoven was a member of the Dutch Zero Group ‘Nul’ around 1960. The Zero and Minimal movements had different backgrounds and objectives, but they shared many of their descriptive criteria, such as the reduction of color through to monochrome, their serial nature, the directness of the material used and the minimal means used. Anti-compositional, un-hierarchical, ‘non-relational’ are concepts that are valid for both trends. Thanks to their repetition and geometrically reduced internal structure, Schoonhoven’s pen-and-ink drawings manage to convey the easily grasped nature and ‘objectivity’ of the whole. A strict adherence to rules is broken by the subjective interpretation of the hand-drawn lines, revealing his reluctance to discount completely the influence of his own personality. The pen-and-ink drawings thus merge basic aspects of both Minimal and Zero.