Opening during Brussels Gallery Weekend, Spazio Nobile in Brussels presents the first solo show of Belgian artist Frederik Vercruysse with the gallery.
In this exhibition, titled Windows, Vercruysse explores the image as a window that opens onto the real and the imaginary. The figurative space takes new shapes in the defined frame, sometimes blurred by frosted glass or a projected shadow. At different levels, the object appears in a humanised landscape, but without a human presence. It is transformed by daylight, at dawn or dusk, creating visual impressions that emerge from a facade, a landscape, a bouquet of flowers…
Frederik Vercruysse invites the visitor to confront the analogue image pushed to the limit, pixelated, becoming truer to itself the closer one gets. Purposefully blurred and distorted in a decomposition that is recreated by our eye that tries to capture its presence, the composition of the image becomes impressionistic and is reborn as the pointillist work of a painter with small brushstrokes.
Windows thus conveys, in Vercruysse’s unique language, a body of poetic images that respond to one another between non-pictorial pictures (Window Stills), and composed objects reflecting the ‘mirror of the soul’ (the Light Boxes and the Mirror Glass Boxes).
The glass, the windows, the glass plates of the photographer of yesteryear become the common thread of this intense investigation. For years, Frederik Vercruysse has tried to combine an analytical, realistic, objective and documentary spirit in his photographic work. He uses the camera like a high-tech tool to produce images in which the frame is entirely staged. By distancing himself, he assembles fragments of the images that he produces over time, to compose lyrical, even hidden, narratives. He thus passes on the feeling of existence, presence and absence, light and its intense rays.
In the backlight or under the light of a Light Box, in the diffraction of an image escaping and vanishing from a Mirror Glass Box, Windows paints and depicts a new nature of image and photography. Through the production of glass objects in collaboration with Atelier Mestdagh, a stained window glass workshop located in Merelbeke in Belgium (listed on Homo Faber, for excellence in craftsmanship in Europe), Spazio Nobile has edited three new creations by Frederik Vercruysse, in limited edition, for their launch during the Brussels Gallery Weekend:
- Windows Stills, photographs, 5 + 2AP
- Windows Light Boxes, bright rooms, 3 + 2AP
- Windows Mirror Glass Boxes, psyches, 3 + 2AP
The photographs were translated into three-dimensional objects whose strength lies in the transparency and subtlety of a living material. The glass has been hand-blown and laminated in the fire. It translates the space in a pictorial and reflective way with a visual scope linked to the space of the gallery. The nature of the image comes to life thanks to the luminous glass frame and shimmering sides cut in the stained-glass workshop. Interplaying with invisibility and with an addition of a new layer of handmade laminated glass or mirror glass, Vercruysse explores the tridimensional and visual effects of framing and unframing his photographs. The subtle play of colours in the photograph and the amplitude of the play of light and shadow allow the image to float in its own space-time.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Frederik Vercruysse
Windows
9 September – 14 November 2021
Spazio Nobile Gallery
rue Franz Merjay 142
1050 Brussels
www.spazionobile.com
Vernissage Spazio Nobile Gallery & Studiolo: 9 September 2021 – 6pm – 10pm
Sunday Brunch 12 September 2021, 12pm – 4pm
After Work Apero 21 October 2021, 7pm – 9pm
Finissage 14 November 2021 – 12pm – 4pm
Open from Tuesday until Saturday, 11am – 6pm or by appointment
