Jef Geys at the Warande

JEF GEYS AT THE WARANDE

Sometime in early 2010, Jef Geys agreed to my proposal that he should be the first artist to use the new exhibition space at the Warande. In the end the delay in finishing the building work led to the exhibition being postponed twice. But now we can finally stage the show.

When, two years ago, I asked the artist to provide me with pictures and text for our booklet, he gave me three photos to which he had added a short caption. For a long time I could not see any direct link between the photos and the work he was going to show. I tried to figure out ‘what the artist wanted to say’. And although I knew his work theoretically and also knew how he approached it, it nevertheless took some time before I truly understood that I did not have to impose anything on Geys’ art to make it work for me.

It is now 50 years since Jef Geys determined for himself the framework within which he wanted to operate as an artist. “I had to start somewhere so I suggested to myself seven themes to examine more closely”. In this way he wanted “to build a bridge between selfevident everyday banality and the reflection on standards.” It was on the basis of this principle that he started his never-ending research. He does not in this way intend to draw conclusions, rather to create possibilities. He appropriates intelligence that was gradually monopolised, standardised and thereby also trivialised by ‘institutions’ and movements at various levels. Since he has already been engaged in this study for 50 years – and is still adding new information to it – Geys has now collected so much information on which to draw that he can immediately supply applicable ‘subsections’ of his research in a particular context. By always working according to the same principle, the artist is able to link very different things together. He can also make new and different connections. The content of his study is often inspired by things from his immediate surroundings. To a certain extent he strips the everyday world of its specific characteristics: he takes concrete things to an abstract level where he then uses them to generate a new particularity. This ‘generic’ working method enables his concrete local studies to be transferred internationally. They can also be transferred in time. In fact it is striking that after 50 years his work has lost none of its topicality. It is precisely because he makes no judgements that new connections can repeatedly be made and new generations find inspiration in his work.

For example, the exhibition will include a small work that Geys has already shown at the Warande, in 1976. It is a study of doctors’ houses in Turnhout. There was an announcement in our monthly newssheet in April 1976. It included several questions: “Who is Jef Geys?

Jef Geys, an artist? Can he paint well? Can he draw and paint extremely well? Must an artist be able to draw and paint well? What is art? Who is an artist? What and why and when is someone an important artist? Is Jef Geys an important artist? Is he one of Belgium’s most important artists? What is culture? What is contemporary culture?

What is domestic culture? What connection is there between culture and Jef Geys? What connection is there between domestic culture and Jef Geys? What is a (medical) doctor?

What do doctors do? How do doctors live? Is there any connection between a doctor and Jef Geys?” He took a black and white photo of every house in Turnhout where a doctor (GP or specialist) officially lived and stuck each one on an index card which at the top also gave the name of the doctor and the street and house number. To avoid confusion he clearly marked the house concerned with a black felt-tip pen. Because of the time that has passed in the meantime, this work has become a document of a specific period. You get the same feeling as when you see old series of police photos taken at a murder scene: at the time it was simply recording the facts, but now the photos have a different import. Many of the doctors have since died and a few of the houses have been demolished, but for the people of Turnhout most of the names will still sound very familiar. You get an overview of the sort of homes the doctors lived in: villas, stately mansions and new, modern houses. At the time most of the doctors still just lived in the centre of Turnhout, in a striking number of cases near to their place of work, the St Elizabeth Hospital, which in 1957 moved from Warandestraat to Rubensstraat. This collection of photos shows us the social position of doctors at the time, the architecture of the seventies, the fact that the well-off abandoned the town, the arrival of doctors from outside the Kempen region (recognisable by their atypical family names), and so on.

Another work that occupies a significant position in this exhibition, and to which the title of the exhibition refers, is a series of photos each showing the same 10 paintings. Jef Geys had these paintings done by the Douven firm, which was the focal point of his exhibition

at the M HKA in 2011. Douven initially specialised in making frames, but soon also started doing paintings by ‘mass production’. They employed amateur painters for this purpose. In 1972 Herman de Coninck interviewed Jef Geys. The article was accompanied by a photo by Herman Selleslaghs in which Geys could be seen with the 10 paintings that will now be on show in Turnhout. They will hang in the same order as in the photo.

They are archetypical landscapes that include a windmill, a boat on the sea, a farm and more of that sort of thing. They are typical of the sort of paintings that used to hang in so many people’s living rooms. The artist commissioned me to go to ten different locations with these paintings, mostly museums in Europe, but also one in the USA. What these locations have in common is the availability of natural light. In each case the paintings were hung and photographed in natural light. You can see that the light in each of the various locations has its own characteristic quality. In the Van Abbe Museum the light is soft, at the MACBA it is bright. The photos were taken in different seasons. If you were to go back now you would probably see a different light. The light even changed while the paintings were being hung. Artificial light remains the same throughout the duration of the exhibition. So why was this light study made? In this way Jef Geys examines the qualities of our new exhibition space, which was built underground and opened in January 2013. The original Warande building opened in October 1972. The parts that were already complete at that time were the entrance hall, the classrooms in the cellar, the library and also the exhibition area. At that time it had quite dominant architecture with dark brick walls, but of course there was also natural light from above that entered through glass skylights, though they were in translucent glass. When the building was extended and renovated, in the end it was decided to house a new exhibition space underground. In a building where lots of the activities do not need daylight (theatre, concerts etc.), the visual art – which throughout history has been housed in buildings that let in daylight – was now put into an underground space with only limited daylight. But visual art itself has in the meantime changed too. In many cases it no longer requires daylight anyway.

1 Geys explains the seven themes himself in a story he wrote in the Kempens Informatieblad, Sao Paolo edition, 1991.

There are no final objects in Jef Geys’ oeuvre. The meaning of his ‘works’ evolves constantly as a result of his working method. The openness that he allows repeatedly gives them new breathing space. It is the context that determines the meaning and it is Jef Geys who determines the context. By combining old works with the new, he redefines them over and over again. This is what he is doing here with these ten paintings.

What about the three photos he sent me for the booklet? The first is a photo of ‘the Beukenhof’ (fig. 1). It was in 1958, in the cellars of this building, that Jef Geys and his wife ran his first exhibition space. The similarity to our cellar area is quite obvious, but at the same time the difference is also put into focus.

The second photo (fig. 2) shows the car in which, in 1967, he put his vegetables – more specifically cabbages – on the backseat and spent a week showing them the hinterland.

Growing one’s own vegetables is something that regularly recurs in Jef Geys’ work.

At the Venice Biennale Jef showed his ‘Quadra Medicinale’ project; he had asked four acquaintances who lived or worked in a large city – Villeurbanne, New York, Moscow and Brussels – to carry out the basic research. He asked them to mark out a quadrant of a square kilometre. Within this area they had to look for 12 plants that grow on the street.

The Wiels website still shows a few individual photos that were part of this work. One of them is an aerial photo of the garden of one of Geys’ friends (fig. 3). This friend had grown plants in four tubs in the familiar quadrant form. To my amazement I think I immediately recognised the place on the aerial photo where ‘Turnhout’ is written. I looked it up for myself using Google Earth (fig. 4) and my opinion was confirmed. As a child I went to swim in the cooling pool next to the glasshouse at the top of the photo countless times.

The garden turned out to be maintained by ‘a neighbouring farmer’. This farmer turned out to be my uncle.

The third photo (fig. 5) shows the chalet that Jef Geys built in 1977. He built it entirely on his own. It had a living room, a kitchen, toilet and a bedroom. He himself considered the chalet to be his most important creation of that year. But the Oosthoek encyclopaedia refused to accept the chalet as a work of art when they themselves asked him to provide them with a photo of one. Several years ago my father built a small house of a similar design for himself, also with his own hands. It is in the garden next to my parents’ house, where I now live with my family.

I realise that I am going against the so-called principle that one should not oneself appear in an objectified rendition of the facts, but in this way I hope simply to provide for others the first step by which they themselves can also enter into dialogue with the work of Jef Geys.

Annelies Nagels, 8 August 2013