Not Scary, but Soft

In Not Scary, but Soft, Nicolaas van de Lande creates a world of softened edges, bright colours, flocked surfaces, and simplified symbols — a world shaped in the image of the first languages we trusted. It recalls a time when explanations were offered gently, often through touch before speech, and when an adult’s assurance — “Don’t worry, it’s not scary, it’s soft” — could turn uncertainty into something manageable, framing experience through care rather than logic. His forms resemble the pedagogical aesthetics of early childhood, those visual and tactile cues designed to reassure before they instruct. They point toward a mode of understanding in which meaning is not yet abstracted but still bound to touch, colour, and the promise of safety. Yet embedded in this softness is also a profound artificiality: a synthetic architecture that reveals how deeply we long for coherence even as we recognise the mechanisms that produce it. 

The pictographs and distilled contours operate like fragments of a language that has not fully decided what kind of language it wants to be. They oscillate between sign and gesture, between symbol and voice. In this suspended state, they evoke Agamben’s infancy — not childhood, but a threshold in which sound, gesture, and form have not yet hardened into the fixed grammar of experience1. Van de Lande’s shapes, in their radical simplicity, seem to reside precisely in that zone: the place where language has not fully committed to being language, where meaning trembles at the edge of articulation. This is why his forms feel simultaneously artificial and deeply human; they simulate the moment before the world becomes organised, when every sign contains more potentiality than instruction. 

It is from within this space of almost-language that the titles of the works — from the childlike naming and onomatopoeic immediacy of Owie and Body Juice to the soft explanatory clarity of How We All Fit Together and How the Sea Got Made — begin to speak, adopting the cadence of how one might guide a child through unfamiliar things, allowing explanation to drift into metaphor and giving language the same soft pliancy carried by the flocked surfaces. In How We All Fit Together, stacked blue panels form a tall, figure-like arrangement whose raised lines behave like pathways or connectors that approach coherence without ever quite locking into place. They create the sensation of a puzzle assembled with pieces that nearly fit but not completely, holding meaning in the delicate space between structure and misalignment. In How the Sea Got Made, rows of red and pink panels carry soft drop shapes that repeat across a shifting gradient, as if rainfall were gathering slowly and gently into a world-making accumulation. They show how van de Lande’s visual and linguistic systems echo the way children learn — through gesture, approximation, repetition, and care — revealing a form of sense-making that begins in softness and continues even within artificial systems shaped to simplify and soothe. In this mode, meaning is felt before it is fully formed, and coherence emerges through connection rather than correctness. 

Across the works, a logic akin to children’s games emerges — precarious, absorbing, lightly structured, able to shift shape at any moment — recalling the earliest forms through which we rehearsed uncertainty and experimented with sense-making before we understood that certainty was a fragile construction. Growing up reveals that coherence does not reside in the world but in the gestures through which we try to hold it together, and van de Lande’s imagery moves with this realisation, allowing tenderness and clarity to coexist with the awareness that the reassuring voice we once depended on remains an echo that we continue to seek. 

Within the distilled and gentle languages of these objects — the pared-down forms, symbolic reductions, and language of early learning — an emotional register emerges through nostalgia, an awareness that the systems through which we seek to stabilise experience have always been provisional, and that the desire for sense persists even as meaning continually exceeds the frames we build for it. The synthetic but soft surfaces and flattened pictographs gather into a space that holds this desire without attempting to resolve it, allowing the vastness that remains unspoken to press gently against the edges of the works, creating a presence shaped by what is withheld as much as by what is shown. In Not Scary, but Soft, the synthetic becomes a vessel for sincerity, a material ground in which the impulse to make sense — to reassure, to comfort, to explain the world in ways one might offer to a child — becomes a way of feeling the real, not through certainty but through care. 

Text by Lan Ying (TRA Collective)