about

My exhibition Echo Chamber in 2020 depicts a symbiotic process that I capture through paintings. The paintings are made in successive series. In each new painting I look for continuity with respect to the previous painting. They collectively represent a passage of time, a situated space and the circumstances in which they were created. Echoes of created paintings, sculptures, tools and leftover material from projects by myself and my studio mate appear as visual language within these works.

A painting often starts from a photographic base that I adjust several times within a painting to create an organic and layered image. I seek a stilled yet living representation. Making paintings turns my studio space into an animistic scene, I attempt to connect a reality with another reality. Artificial lighting, composition and sculpture are used to create a scene that looks both messy and mystical.

In my projects I do not try to create fiction, but rather to place an unusual or alternative reality within reality. My method often focuses on the transformation of locally available material that gains meaning by giving it a new function. I look for interaction with site-specific conditions that trigger a process. What connects my work inside and outside the studio is an imaginative reflection on a perceived reality. I try to give the process of manifestation a central place in my work. 

In 2014, I orchestrated the live event Recording in wood. Within the exhibition space, 12 local musicians made music for exactly 4 hours while 10 invited artists were instructed to duplicate the musicians' musical equipment in wood during these 4 hours. The event underscores how documentation always impacts a live situation. The noise from the artists' power tools drowned out the loud rock music, which in turn caused the musicians to turn up the amplifiers and made verbal communication during the live event nearly impossible. After the event, the noise seems to have been trapped in the wooden sculptures left behind as artifacts. “They kept quiet like objects of shamanism that only come to life with the right ritual,” wrote Jeanne Prisser in her article about the exhibition in De Volkskrant. The symbiotic process that created the exhibition left both sawdust and the smell of beer in every corner of the exhibition space, giving the work a palpable passage of time. 

For several years I have been making saunas in public spaces. The first sauna was both built and heated with the wood left by other artists in the storage space of ZSenne Art lab. The art space is located in a mixed-use neighborhood in the center of Brussels. 

The Common Sweat Sauna #1 was built over seven days while improvising on a square in front of the art space. This public production aimed to make the transformation of material visible. Neighbors soon offered building materials, and the public building process created a social breeding ground that the work intended and needed. 

Artists involved in the art space, visitors and local residents sat in the sauna to experience the artwork through physical engagement and contemplation in the company of others. The deliberate absence of windows created a contrast between the sensory space of the sauna and life on the street directly outside of it. The street sounds, such as a passing rolling suitcase, were experienced by the sauna visitors as unreal, so much so that the entrance to the sauna was described as a portal to a space of magical realism. My role as an artist is performative and acts as a catalyst of the situation. 

With the Common Sweat Sauna project, I respond to the function and history of the art space by using remnants of previous exhibitions on the one hand and interacting with the immediate social and public environment on the other. The relationship between artwork, spectator and exhibition space is subverted and activated in a new configuration. 

During my stay in Curaçao at IBB in 2017, I felt strongly drawn to a desolate piece of land on the northeast side of the island. Coral di Tabac, I was told, often features in folk ghost stories. It is an uninhabited piece of land that serves as a dumping ground for washing machines, broken furniture and refrigerators and is filled with the fast-growing Datu cactus. It is also a place for criminals to strip cars and it is best not to walk around at night.

With permission from the environmental department, I cut down a large 9-armed cactus weighing about 1,000 pounds, which I hollowed out and then allowed the cactus skin to ferment and dry. With this material, I made a large cactus head, with which I participated in the great Carnival parade with a group of invited art students. Inspired by ideas about animism and local ghost stories, I started painting again during this residency. I saw in that desolate plain with trash and cactus not only pollution and nature, but also a landscape that (possibly) took on a life of its own at night. 

Focusing on painting over the past few years has given me greater clarity about my artistic motivations: I seek a superlative that emerges from an imaginary or mystical reality placed within an existing reality. The act of painting is performative. I act and perform within my own created scenario and find new perspectives to further my search for magical realities. The sculptures that  recently feature in my work are like caves or stalactites: they refer both to the echo of a cave (as an acoustically reflective space), and to Plato's cave itself, which serves as an allegory for a philosophical process of awareness toward an ideal, or in this case, my own staged world.