moom bookshop

Chantal Rens creates analogue cut-and-paste collages that allow us to peer into a parallel universe. The images appear to be photographs, and yet we are left searching for familiar or direct points of reference. The space in which the people, animals, and landscapes exist is somehow different. ‘That’s when walls are thin’ is a limited edition folder of fifteen prints, a series Rens created between 2010 and 2020. Comprised of material extracted from Dutch magazines of the 1930s through the 1960s, the collages might induce a nostalgic yearning for a simpler world that does not exist. Yet the temporal displacement is a reminder that nothing was ever perfect, and it never will be.