I.
Meaning, Jacques Derrida argued, is never fully present. It is always deferred—displaced onto other signs, other contexts, other moments. There is no stable origin, no final resting place for sense. Language, and by extension all systems of signification, operate through difference and deferral, through the endless play of traces that point elsewhere. This philosophical insight, central to deconstruction, finds an unexpected material counterpart in the practice of Erris Huigens, who works under the name Deconstructie. For Huigens, a work begins not as an image but as an action. A gesture that extends into space and quietly reorganises how we experience it. This is not art conceived in the studio and transported to its destination. It is art that emerges from encounter—from the physical, durational negotiation between body, material, and site. The work does not illustrate an idea; it performs one. And what it performs, again and again, is an act of displacement: meaning shifted, context unsettled, presence deferred. Huigens came to this practice through years of spraying abstract graffiti in Leeuwarden, where he studied Art and Design, and later in Amsterdam. The street taught him that surfaces are never neutral. Walls carry time. They accumulate weather, use, neglect—layers of history that no white cube can replicate. His interventions do not erase these histories; they activate them. A single line, a cut, a minimal geometric form can make a space reorganise itself around it. An eroded wall becomes a textured background. A surface that once read as ruin begins to read as image.
II.
Huigens is drawn to liminal states: wastelands, sand depots, industrial edges, vacant properties, post-industrial spaces. These are sites that exist between categories—no longer functional, not yet reclaimed. They are spaces of suspension, where the normal coordinates of meaning have loosened. It is precisely this loosening that interests him. His interventions do not resolve the ambiguity of these places; they intensify it. They encourage a critical examination of spaces and forms, inviting viewers to see what was always there but had become invisible through familiarity or disregard. The methods vary. Sometimes it is paint: large-format black-and-white works applied directly to walls, geometric abstractions that dialogue with the architecture they inhabit. Sometimes it is a play with what is real and what is ai generated: concrete blocks, vertical, mute, brutal, inserted into places that did not ask for them. Their mere presence unsettles the implicit order of their surroundings. They create friction. They interrupt. Each block is a rupture in the continuity of the landscape, a sign that refuses to signify in any conventional way.
III.
And yet, there is a history at work in these gestures—one that is both public and deeply personal. The geometric vocabulary Huigens employs inevitably evokes the legacy of Constructivism, that early twentieth-century faith in abstraction as a universal language, in the grid as a tool for rational reorganisation of the world. But if Huigens inherits this vocabulary, he does so in order to deconstruct it. Placed in decaying industrial sites, in landscapes of abandonment, the clean lines of geometric abstraction become testaments to imperfection and entropy. The Constructivist dream of a total, rational environment meets its inverse: spaces where that dream has already failed, where time and neglect have undone the logic of human planning. There is another lost future embedded in this work—one more intimate. Huigens incorporates materials from his father's former practice as a landscape architect. Ten years ago, his father suffered an accident that caused severe brain damage. The two had planned to collaborate on projects bridging land art and landscape architecture, combining nature and culture, abstraction and natural elements. That future never arrived. It became, in Huigens' words, a lost future. The work carries this absence. It marks not only what was, but what might have been. The sign speaks to the past and to a future that will not come. It is memorial and rupture at once. Now the artist lives in his parents’ house and works in his father’s former studio, archiving the materials his father left behind. Huigens used his father’s grid paper to create new collages that also align with the Dutch tradition of working with minimal, gridded forms. Huigens: ‘He (my father) was a collector of thousands of books on architecture, philosophy, landscape, plants, art, etc., etc. He taught me to be an artist. So, I will also honour him by working on the future of my work. From him, I inherited my passion for working with form and placement inside space, and my connection to architecture.’
IV.
The exhibition at Lescer Gallery combines photographic documentation and video works with drawings and large-format paintings on the wall, all dedicated to the specific space of the pre-war house that hosts the gallery. It also includes the deconstruction of his previous work through combining the materials of the art process with those reclaimed locally. Here, the conditions differ from those at his usual sites. This is not an abandoned building, nor a pristine white cube. It moves between those two worlds: a gallery, and a house that has retained its layers and irregularities, the quiet traces of previous histories. In this in-between state, Huigens shifts his focus. The aim is no longer simply to transform the space, but to bring attention to the act of making itself—to that early, physical negotiation in which the work begins to take shape within the architecture. Huigens is interested in the tension between the pre-war building and the conventions of the white cube gallery. The pre-war interior carries its own syntax: proportions, surfaces, details that speak of a different era, a different set of assumptions about domestic life and spatial organisation. The white cube, by contrast, aspires to neutrality, to the erasure of context in favour of the autonomous artwork. Huigens' intervention refuses to resolve this tension. Instead, he occupies it. His geometric forms dialogue with both registers—acknowledging the space's history while insisting on the mark’s contemporary presence.
V.
What does Huigens' sign mark? The past, the future, the present? Perhaps all three, held in suspension. It is art that refuses the comfort of narrative resolution, that holds open the gap between sign and meaning, between gesture and interpretation. In this holding-open, something becomes possible: not understanding, exactly, but attention. A slower, more careful kind of seeing.
Erris Huigens (Deconstructie) lives and works in Wageningen, the Netherlands. He has carried out projects in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Mexico, and Vietnam.
