Our concepts and rationalizations might have lent themselves to abandon the state of despair at times, they too fulfill the sense of hollowness. Whereas the subject of our search is the real, our understandings are muted, transformed and reconstructed. Much like Jack Gilbert denounces it in the opening of his stunning The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart: “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite”. For this series I xeroxed black rectangles on top of Thomas Struth’s photographs (from the book Dandelion Room) using painters tape to protect the colorful flowers from being obliterated.

http://www.artbook.com/1891024264.html

I made a coloring book for myself! The outlines for the drawings inside are constituted by photocopies of aluminium foil packaging that embody the shapes of absent objects. Their brittle surfaces and the colorful spots and smudges I‘ve added depict the dialectical relation between the image and the world behind it. The result solidifies my immediate and emotional surroundings in a playful outcome that reflects my interest in the instinctive and confounds medium specificity.

Elective Affinities was a collaborative project with Jasper Rigole inspired by the Mnemosyne Atlas of the German art historian Aby Warburg. We installed a temporary workspace in a local bar where we collected, combined and reproduced pictures from newspapers and magazines with a photocopier. We responded to each other’s proposals by adding pictures, editing existing ensembles or by responding to the traces that arose during the project. The final book, an edition of 65, was handmade during a live event. Click here, for a look inside the book.

http://www.jasperrigole.com

By making this series of slides I tried to explore the confines between material and image by means of a phenomenological approach. The repetitive gesture of erasing, involving the removal of pigment (carbon powder of a photocopier) through the almost mechanical action of scratching, articulates the nexus between documentation, staging and abstraction. Together with the continuous archaeological investigation of the technical conditions of the medium, I aim to stimulate the imagination by revealing what is underneath: a private, introspective language.

I am often impressed with the proposals by which the copier engulfs me. Appearances can easily disappear again, a ceaseless becoming formed by the intangible and transient. This process and the renewed uniqueness that is given to the sculptures, images and drawings that I investigate, allow me to acknowledge the distance between me and the objects of my fascination.

http://youtu.be/mKBCTVwY9Fs

Since a year or so I buy old vinyl stencils at the local art supplies shop whenever I find two identical twins. I prefer the Helvetica font and all variations thereof, because of the confusion that arises when they are similar but not identical. By transferring them to paper they result in unique pieces because of unintended consequences of the implementation and the circumstances in which the vinyl has been preserved.

This work is prompted by a red-leather-bound-near-hardcover-with-gilt-text-on-the-spine-book I bought in a bookshop in Venice for it’s marvelous reproductions. These photographs of porcelain vases, jugs and other everyday-canvases, contain a unique universe in which scale is lost due to their isolated and autonomous state. It seems as if the objects are created for the photographs instead of the other way around. I accentuated these reproductions in their autonomous and unique state by disrupting the photographic potential to clarify, thereby creating a distinctive fracture between layers.

These works are copies that do not recall any original, but merely depict the process in which the image was created. Despite the procedural and repetitive character, by spray painting the same stencil over and over again it creates numerous stains and irregularities that incorporate the accidental. These deviations in the geometric, hypnotic plain become the nature of the exercise and fixates the uniqueness of the outcome. The works appear as a blind spot in the world of the visible, through being apparently aimless involved with themselves.

A few years ago I came across four clandestine photographs taken at Auschwitz by a member of the Sonderkommando. Quickly I became fascinated by the compositions of the photographs. At least two of them have striking black outlines. A remarkable visual reference to the inside and doorway of a gas chamber, the dark room in which the photographer had to hide to make these photographs. In a universe of representation images link to other images rather than referring to the ‘real’ they evoke. This ‘inability’ is the paradoxical and questionable power of photography. However, in this case the inability has become the very core of what these photographs depict; they emphasize the indisputable distance between photographer and viewer, between inside and outside.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/page422.shtml

Leftovers of a cut out image are piled up in transparent layers. The accumulation prevents them from becoming invisible and translates these edges into a kind of painterly transcendence. The second piece consists of 12 color copies from an enlarged photograph of a wave. This sequence emphasizes the lack of dynamism and exalts the motionless wave as a metaphor for the elusive now.

Everyday objects and materials constitute traces of our contemporary existence. By approaching them as autonomous carriers of personal associations and delicate musings on matter and surface, they become an intriguing ramification of connotations. In addition, I selected these items because they constitute an allusion to the technical characteristics of the analog camera and the traditional photographic process.

For this show I chose photographs that shared the apparent lack of a clear topic or framework, such as passages, gaps, reflections, a dead body, etc. They fascinated me because they depict an individual atmosphere, abstract and reticent, and at the same time figurative. A vocabulary dedicated to non-representational mark-making of the inexplicable sentiment.

During a visit to Berlin, I discovered the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with its remarkable classic layout. Charmed by this austere approach I became fascinated in the relativity of newspapers; the endless manifestations of the same tangible object. I tried to reconcile the various dimensions of reality with a simple gesture that resisted the egocentricity of expression. A tribute to newspapers, they remind us of the world’s ever changing nature.

During ‘Borderlines and their disappearance’ I showed some of the photographs, newspaper clippings and paper scraps I had collected at that time. Since I couldn’t find a conclusive form, it turned out as a performance where I was constantly organizing and rearranging a selection of photographs and other fragments from my archive.

During the workshop ‘Borderlines and their disappearance’ I had an interesting encounter with Bas Ketelaars. As a result we made a work based on a performance by Ulay & Marina Abramović (Imponderabilia - 1977). The workshop ended with a brief exhibition in the research gallery of Sint-Lucas Campus Congres, Antwerp.

INDEX is a collection of books entitled ‘Catalogus’ (Eng: catalogue). Each book contains a series of images that were recorded in one gesture or collected over a short period of time. The images were organized into categories according to the most abundant subject or object. Therefore the box consists of an arbitrary and unbound set of synonyms, fragmented pieces of reality. Click here, for a look inside one of the catalogues.

Magnum Opus, Magnum Opus is a visual essay on the ambivalent relationship and curiosity towards images of violence, based on a book of Klaus Staeck (Pornografie, published in 1971 by Steidl). The book consists of monochrome photocopies of press photos next to randomly collected pictures of shootings, fights, arrests and abuse, as if these photographs merely say ‘Look at me, I present an event that could occur anywhere in the world and seems to repeat itself continuously’.