Group exhibition, Positioning Space

Positioning space

Space, light, and materiality all depend upon our perception and sensorial experience. We relate to space through a sense of spatiality and our body’s position in the world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty sets a theoretical floor for our bodily perception of space. We don’t live separately from our environments. We aren’t just objects passively affected by the exterior to have a perceptual experience. We are subjects who inhabit the world. We intimately relate to it to form meaningful experiences. Our subjective perception allows us not only to receive the world as it is but to add meaning and value to it. Emotions and aesthetics are intricately related to this value addition. Our perception of an object is more than just its physicality, but its cultural, social, and political implications, as well as its relation with other objects. An element is only constituted in its relation to the whole. Insofar as we are incarnate minds within the world, perception involves bodily engagement.

Following this line of thought, Axel Vervoordt Gallery presents Positioning Space, a group exhibition comprising the work of seven artists, whose work confronts space in various ways. The Escher Gallery enables an oscillating experience between the present moment, and a mental moment of presence, as Germaine Kruip would state, anchored in each of the works presented.

How do we feel space? Do we feel space? It appears not as a physical ether where we all move, but as an introspective experience subject to our baggage and the architectural environment.

Tension is infused upon us as we enter the gallery space. The softness of Norio Imai’s “Work-Circle” cotton canvas gets disrupted by the intensity of its movement. Through his industrial sensibility, he connects to the third Gutai generation and bridges onto a futuristic aesthetic. He creates bulbous reliefs that exist somewhere in between the object and the painting. By placing material underneath the surface of his works, Imai creates monumental monochrome white paintings out of almost nothing. To him, white is a landscape made up of nothingness and emptiness. How does such a simple gesture provoke an effect of withholding? His other exhibited work, “White Ceremony- Diamond A & Diamond B” offers us an exploration of convexities, concavities, and objectivity. His plastic practice transcends the painting box category into a more complex multidisciplinary field.

We find another access point to the perception of space through contradiction in Renato Nicolodi’s “Trias IV”, it fills our sight with an ephemeral density that paradoxically contains emptiness. We immediately release the inflicted tension on Lucia Bru’s “309 672 cm3“ of porcelain. The tiny blocks are given a monumental dimension, which destabilises the viewers and makes them more aware of their bodies in time and space. Bru consciously adds human insecurity to geometrical structures, which lends a special narrative power to her abstract, visual vocabulary. Her sculptural installations are a delicate dialogue between the vulnerability of the naked object and the surrounding space in which it tries to find its place.

The lightness of letting go follows with Boll’s double sculpture hovering in the space. It appears as immaterial lines drawn in the air, almost weightless and imaginary. The imperceptibly fine strips of steel extend into the unknown, to which the sculptures-as impulse and guide-direct the view. The actual material extends beyond its limitations into the realm of potentiality. This potential is not only manifested by visible changes in the sculptures but also by the viewer's observation. The viewer starts to engage with the emptiness of the void. In the meantime, the sculpture can open up the viewer's perceptions of the surroundings. It brings in "possibility"—it makes one aware. Hence the void is a fullness as well—a plenitude of possibilities. Fullness and nothingness come together.

“Black Bar” dims the light coming into the gallery space and shows us the impermanence of its plasticity. The fragile quality of the glass, combined with the solidity of the bar and the dense black lends this work an otherworldly presence. Its immaterial aspects stimulate our understanding of space and reality. “It is this void that I try to set in motion, conferring upon it a kind of temporality. I always experiment with the possibilities of rendering fluid the perception of matter or architecture which I see as some kind of obstacle to movement and sculpture” in Ann Veronica Janssens’ words.

Volatility surrounds the visual void imposed by the gallery’s hollow ceilings, which is reproduced and contrasted throughout the exhibition. This universal power enables us to experiment with Kruip’s “Kannadi, Square and Circle Sequence” as an immersive experience in multiple dimensions; through its observation, our reflection, and its contention within the circle-squared gallery walls. She studies the scenography of ungraspable phenomena, such as the ever-changing daylight and the passage of time; the relationship between art and ritual in repetitive gestures, aiming to subtly alter perception; historical attempts to create abstraction using geometry.

The unfolding atmosphere attains our attention to Yuko Nasaka’s circles. Like a Japanese philosopher, she can express profound thoughts with very simple means. Like every genuine Gutai artist, Nasaka considers herself to be nothing more than the medium that can allow matter to express itself further.

We finally find an answer to the longing of escaping the void and volatility found throughout the exhibition; in Michel Mouffe’s “Détachement”. By challenging the limits of painting, the subtle protuberances emerging from behind, introduce the curve as a new element in the space of the canvas. The mystery of the abstract, rounded shape attracts the eye and becomes the motif. A result of the integration of sculpture in the surface is that Mouffe's works become an in-between. Several layers of diluted paint are applied while the canvas is horizontal, making for a translucent surface that gives a fragility that relates to life, and that reminds us that Mouffe sees painting as a theatre for the condition humaine. “These tensions, specific to my work, are never present as such, but they are a part of the play of the colors and the different layers that are superposed on the surface of my paintings. These processes help to achieve the result that makes it possible to project the painting towards the gaze of the spectator, while at the same time, it attains a centrifugal and centripetal effect.” states the artist.

On seldom occasions, we take a moment to consciously feel our impact on the surroundings, and its impact upon us. It’s in the aim of enabling things -architecture, art, landscape, light, and us- to be connected, that Positioning space opens up the possibility of experimenting with our senses far from just glancing in the space, stimming the works.

Bibliography

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Space in “Phenomenology of Perception”, 1945