Becoming an Image
(and moving on to the next one)
on the work of Rinus VAN DE VELDE
Twelve theatrical self-portraits, eleven of which are literally larger-than-life-size: for what is his first solo show in an internationally acknowledged institute � a�show that runs from 1 February until 10 March 2013 at CAC M�laga, Spain � young and upcoming Belgian artist Rinus Van de Velde (born 1983) did not exactly choose a modest approach.
On the contrary: Van de Velde shamelessly puts himself � or at least his artistic persona � at the center of attention. The spectator finds himself in a�room lined with impressively rendered, realistic �windows' to an egotistic make-believe world, all at�equal distance to each other. In that alternate universe, the artist becomes any character he wants to be: a miner smeared with soot (or is it charcoal?), Sir Isaac Newton, a tennis hero in action, a character in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, an angry sculptor, a performance artist reminding of Beuys�
Accompanied by long titles that begin with a variation on the phrase �self-portrait as' and are composed like mini-stories, the drawings have a picturesque as well as a cinematographic, almost Hollywoodian quality. Almost, but not quite, as the ostensible artificiality of the scenes (recurring and random props) makes the reality of their production in the artist's studio creep back in, while anachronisms and blatant historical falsities (Newton using a modern age pipette to drip paint in his eyes) and self-irony highlight the fictiveness of the stories. But openly fictive and ironic as they may be, the works remain boldly self-centered.
INHABITING THE MULTITUDE
Figurative, narrative, dramatic, autobiographical and narcissistic: in many ways, there is something very unfashionable, possibly even pre-modernist about Van de Velde's drawings at the CAC. The works do not fit easily in an autonomous tradition that focuses on the work itself and chooses to neglect the artist who made it, and have even less to do with certain neopolitical or social tendencies in contemporary art. Yet the drawings are awkwardly contemporary, and touch a sensitive chord in an age that � in spite of all critical deconstructions of the Ego and the Image � has never been more obsessed with the self and how it is developed through images.
One could say that Van de Velde's practice is essentially a mixed reaction to the image-saturated world the artist grew up in. In his earlier works, Van de Velde used an abundance of available photographic images � from magazines like National Geographic and online databases � as source material for his drawings. The idea was to try and inhabit that multitude, to appropriate and incorporate it, a gesture that could be seen as a�materialisation or enlargement of what every contemporary viewer does to a certain extent: relating images to the �world' he lives in, or better: to�reality as he subjectively experiences it.
In one of his earlier exhibitions, William Crowder; 40�years of sculpture, at the �Kunst nu'-space for young artists in S.M.A.K., Ghent, 2008, Van de Velde linked together a series of drawings based on very disparate found footage by presenting them as fragments� Subscribe to read this article in full
