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Nestor of Dutch sculpture. Internationally known. That is Carel Visser. His visual language testifies to a free world of autonomous things. As a boy, he learned welding, woodworking and other craft skills in his father's construction company. He also developed a special passion for the art of assembly. He put together things that apparently had nothing to do with each other into a new, authentic and functionless whole that served no purpose other than to be looked at.

Visser is a real constructor. He welds pieces of iron together to form a torso or an animal figure and transforms wooden bollards into birds. Over the years, Visser's work has regularly changed form. Whereas his first sculptures could be called expressionist, his later ones gradually became more and more abstract. First they were abstracted nature motifs in iron, then totally abstract double forms and his so-called 'salami sculptures', massive iron beams that were sawn into slices. In the sixties, the cube was central. It was not until the 1980s that Visser abandoned geometry. Since then, he has mostly made intuitive assemblages made of, for example, car tyres, sheep's wool, wood and feathers. Nature is the source of inspiration in Visser's entire oeuvre.

So too for Visser's pedestal sculpture. In Switzerland, I once saw snow on a spruce tree', Visser says in an interview in NRC Handelsblad (17-6-1994). Such a tree is a wonderfully structured thing. I thought: yes, that's one for me. I am going to convert it into an image. The sculpture is just the snow, I left out the tree. Visser piled up his snowy spruce from polystyrene foam, which was then cast in bronze. The casting channels have remained visible. With his pedestal sculpture he has harked back to his early sculptures. In contrast to the rest of his oeuvre, these are vertical rather than horizontal.