Foundation Art and Public Space
artist: Joost van den Toorn
located in: Rembrandthof, Laan van de Heelmeesters 2, Hilversum
Joost van den Toorn created two works for the Rembrandthof, a psychiatric clinic in Hilversum. He furnished the central lobby with ceramic portraits of Freud, Jung and Foudraine, all notable figures in the field of psychiatry and added one of De Jong, the clinic’s director. For the interior garden he designed a sculpture titled Donnie Darko, which is composed of three friendly-looking little fellows standing on top of each other. The top one was provided with a moustache and two perkily positioned ears that stand out against the sky. The sculpture was named after the film Donnie Darko in which a possibly schizophrenic boy is treated by a psychiatrist. Donnie tells the psychiatrist about his dreams of the nightly meetings with his alter ego, who is ten years his senior, acts like a brother and disguises himself as a hare. Together they travel through time performing good deeds.
Joost van den Toorn
Donnie Darko
Foto: Tom Haartsen
While keeping the idea of a totem pole in mind, Van den Toorn designed his sculpture, a vertical assemblage of corresponding figures that create an upward-looking perspective within the confines of the garden. The heads of the figures are a few sizes too big for their bodies, which emphasizes their youthful innocence. The sculpture wasn’t placed directly on the ground but was, instead, mounted onto a blue pedestal, thereby creating a contrast with the green overgrowth and isolating it from its surroundings.
It’s no coincidence that the image of a hare was chosen for the film and for Joost van den Toorn’s sculpture to represent a symbol of the unattainable and ideal ‘’I’’. Indeed hares appear and disappear in the moonlight, like silent and fleeting shadows. With their gray-brown color, they can barely be tracked by the human eye as they shoot across the field and beyond the horizon at dusk. In many cultures the hare accordingly performs the role of a mythical sorcerer from the mysterious kingdom of the full moon who offers access to the realm of the imagination.
