Vistamare opens its exhibition season with a show dedicated to Jan Vercruysse.
The artist presents works executed in the 1990’s and the new millennium that belong to different series of compositions: Tombeaux, Les Paroles XVII, Grande Camera Oscura, and a portfolio dated 1992 that was produced in a limited edition of 44 copies, containing nine proposals for the cover of a magazine.
Jan Vercruysse’s works are like the words of a discourse: each one is an independent entity that, together with the others, constitutes another entity. It almost seems that the artist engages in a process of deconstruction and then construction, working lucidly and consciously.
This is exactly the impression made by the Tombeaux (a term that in the French language has the dual meaning of a burial place and poetic composition in memory of someone who no longer exists). Their construction is severely monumental, distinguished by the geometric rigor of the volumes and precious quality of the materials, which are physically impenetrable, and become a place closed in on itself but open to our memory or imagination. The same desire of highlighting geometric rigor and a never resolved significance of the object is at the basis of: Les Paroles [Letto] XVII. Here the sculpture, constructed as a severe reading stand but also as a semi-open book, contains the following: on the one side, a page with a musical score, and on the other side, an erotic image from the 19th century.
In the other work featured in this exhibition, Grande camera oscura (Arlecchino), Jan Vercruysse returns to photography, which he used to execute his self-portraits in the early 1980’s. They are “mises en scène,” representations of subjects taken from art history and reinterpreted with the camera oscura mechanism that the artist uses as a conceptual tool, radically altering the images: the frame delimits the place, and the constructed image becomes play, memory, and solitude.
Jan Vercruysse was born in 1948 and lives and works in Western Europe.
In Italy, the artist participated at the 45th Venice Biennale (1993) as the representative of Belgium, and was one of the artists who participated in the initiative “Luci d’artista” in Turin, with a sculpture installed at Piazzetta Reale, “Fontane Luminose.”