SENEX PUERILIS | 2008 - 2012
This unique private collection is my all time favourite. At the time located in a large Georgian town house in London's East End, the result of years of passionate collecting by two collectors was a house in which every corner in every room was brimming with well and truly wonderous –and forever changing– object arrangements. The taste and collecting-preference of the collectors, the private domestic context with its non-institutional freedom together with the collectors' all pervading mischievous sense of humour resulted in what was a massive cabinet of curiosities full of playful compositions of curious objects of beauty with objects of death. I took these photos in London between 2008-2012 and always loved spending time in this house and photographing the collection. Even though in this private context it would have been possible, I never rearranged any objects for the photographs. I look at this collection as an ‘installation’ and I can only consider the resulting images as a collaboration between the collectors and me. In the book 'Cabinets of Curiosities' Patrick Mauries, reminds on the fact that the obsessive collecting that resulted in some of the earliest large ‘Wunderkammern’ such as the collection of the Habsburg Kaiser Kaiser Rudolf II, the ‘Sammelkaiser’, was seen as equally 'childish' and 'intellectual' which resulted in the naming of the collector as ‘Senex Puerilis’, the ‘aged child’. As this pairing of intellect and playfulness was such a strong element of the Malplaquet House collection I gave the series the title: 'Senex Puerilis'. Klaus Wehner, updated: Berlin, Autumn 2021