Wandelgids Patrick Van Caeckenbergh Engels by Mleuven

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PATRICK VAN CAECKENBERGH La ruine fructueuse 02.02.12

22.04.12

GALLERY 1 | « SPIJSKAMER. LE SYNOPTIQUE » To visit this exhibition is to step inside the world of Patrick Van Caeckenbergh (Aalst, °1960). It brings together work from the 1980s through to the present day in an extraordinary total installation.

CIGARETTE BOX In the first gallery Van Caeckenbergh reconstructs his actual studio in a museum for the first time. All the works he has made have been created in this space, which he refers to as his ‘cigarette box’. Van Caeckenbergh describes the things around him in this gallery as a “precis of his life and work”. The books are an important source of inspiration and contain scientific diagrams, religious stories and fairytales. There are books about architecture, philosophy, history, biology, ethnology and anthropology. His thirst for knowledge is insatiable. But the capacity of the bookcase is limited and no book is added unless another is first removed. In the little boxes on the shelves he keeps cuttings of rosy cheeks, pieces of skin or, for example, eggs, which he collects and later uses in his collages.

It is here in this space that Van Caeckenbergh distils all the information he reads and collects. Or, as he says: “This is the ‘reduction’ space”. This is where the collages and maquettes which serve as preliminary studies for the monumental sculptures, assemblages and installations further along, saw the light of day.

COLLECTING Van Caeckenbergh’s oeuvre stems from an uncontrollable desire to collect and order the world around him. His passion for collecting began early in life, triggered by a ‘Winkler Prins’ encyclopedia given to him by his mother even before he could read. He found the book’s didactic pictures and diagrams (about the human anatomy, the animal kingdom, etc.) particularly fascinating and the artist developed a life-long obsession for classifying and associating data, experiences, objects and ideas. He sets to work as follows: first he reads and studies and makes notes in notebooks. He works associatively, making use of taxonomy, genealogy, cartography, cosmology, etymology and the like. Collages follow and finally the completed object. He regards the preparatory process as 95% of the work, attaching less importance to the end result. Slowness characterizes the whole creative process; many years might separate the first stage and the last. Distilling, ‘reducing’ all the information, takes time and Van Caeckenbergh’s ‘tinkering’ is also labour-intensive.

GALLERY 2 | « AU TOUR DU MONDE » A WORLD OF HIS OWN With the fanciful sculptures Van Caeckenbergh creates a universe of his own, peopled by idiosyncratic characters and surrealistic travel machines. The sculptures are - often absurd ways of trying to fathom the world. For example, there is Berceau, a nautilus shell and baby carriage in one, and Chapeau, a hat which contains all the information in the world and symbolizes the infinite capacity of the human memory. Van Caeckenbergh got the idea for this hat from a Russian story about a man suffering from hyperamnesia, which means he remembers everything. Thanks to the hat’s little compartments and subdivisions, the wearer can literally organize his thoughts. The surrealistic travel machines are vehicles for fictitious characters. Thus the Rocket was designed for a Martian who travels in a rocket to report on our world. The innermost part contains mathematical formulas, while the shelves on the outside feature ordinary objects from everyday life. The fictitious characters give Van Caeckenbergh the opportunity to observe and fathom the world from a distance.

GALLERY 3 | « STIR CONSTANTLY, THEN ALLOW THE CONTENTS TO SIMMER GENTLY UNTIL… » DIGESTION Van Caeckenbergh is fascinated by the digestive system. For him it is a reference to the way the artist ‘processes’ and ‘censors’ knowledge for the moment of ‘evacuation’; in that sense the productions themselves are no more than residue, corpses. He regards the stomach as the most important organ – more important even than the brain. It is the stomach which processes all the food and thus produces the energy we require to move, speak and think. Consequently, the digestive tract is a recurrent theme in his work. His House of Cards is a case in point; it is a representation of the food pyramid in the form of a house of cards. The digestive process begins with the mouths at the top. The pyramid symbolizes the fragile balance that eating entails. If you eat something unhealthy or eat too much, you upset not only the balance of your own body, but also- on a macro-level the ecological equilibrium. The subject of digestion is covered very literally behind the walls of Paravent. In this intimate space the artist appears in person at various times and makes soup. Visitors can eat with him. He sees eating and digesting soup as a metaphor for the way we obtain and process information. The artist also regards eating together as a way of forming a community and of adding tastes and smells to the exhibition alongside all the visual stimuli.

GALLERY 4 | ÂŤ ET PUIS, POURQUOI SOMMES-NOUS FAITES SANS VIANDE ? Âť SKIN Whereas in the travel models Patrick Van Caeckenberg observes the world in a detached manner, in the early 1990s he launched an in-depth investigation into himself and his past. The collection of skins plays an important role in that period. In the early 1990s Van Caeckenbergh started cutting skin from advertisements and pornographic and other magazines in an almost maniacal way. He selects squares and rectangles which no longer contain references to the body. He avoids anything confrontational: penises and vaginas disappear from view. Everything becomes abstract. Van Caeckenbergh sometimes spends hours on end cutting out skin. For him it is a survival tactic, a therapeutic activity. By literally minimizing the hard images, he is better able to deal with his uncomfortable attitude to sexuality. He cuts so as to heal. He also sees it as a self-inflicted form of censorship; a way of curbing his vivid imagination. The artist presents the huge quantity of skin in rows one above the other, thus creating rhythm and linearity, which puts one in mind of a stave. In the middle of the gallery is the Ventriloquist, another reference to digestion.

GALLERY 5 | QUIET HAPPINESS « ENSCONCED DEEP IN THE EARTH, I SLEPT THE WHOLE WINTER UNTIL... » Patrick Van Caeckenbergh found ‘Quiet Happiness’ in Sint-Kornelis-Horebeke. Since moving to this small village in the Flemish Ardennes, the artist has increasingly found inspiration in his own life. He is closely involved in the local community. For example, he made this light-blue Heaven specially for the village’s annual procession in honour of Saint Kornelis, patron saint of children. The canopy served as a ‘roof ’ for the children from the village school. He made sure that exactly two classes of children can fit under it. The oldest villagers carried him and the parish priest walked behind the canopy. The listed tree in his own garden inspired a series of drawings of old trees which he collects under the title The Old in Years. Each drawing is based on a photograph of an old tree which he copies very carefully using tracing paper. The series currently consists of 27 drawings, but that number is not finite.

BIOGRAPHY | PATRICK VAN CAECKENBERGH Patrick Van Caeckenbergh (Aalst, °1960) studied sculpture and ceramics at the Academy in Aalst before going on to the Academy in Ghent. In 1996 he won the Flemish Community Culture Prize. Van Caeckenbergh regularly takes part in solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad. As well as featuring in private collections, his work is on show in a number of national and international museums.

PUBLICATION The first extensive monograph on Patrick Van Caeckenbergh’s work from the eighties until the present. On the basis of numerous photos of artworks and views of exhibition spaces, this monograph provides a detailed overview of the various periods in his work. Patrick Van Caeckenbergh. La ruine fructueuse. Atlas des idéations Dutch/French/English, with new texts by Natacha Pugnet, Sofie Van Loo and Eva Wittocx 208 full-colour pages | Uitg. Lannoo | ISBN 978 94 014 0053 4 | PRICE € 55 | For sale at the M-shop

ART EDITION

COLOPHON TEXT Marthy Locht DESIGN Patrick Van Caeckenbergh & Daneel Bogaerts CURATOR Eva Wittocx ALL THE ILLUSTRATIONS © Patrick Van Caeckenbergh With thanks to all lenders and the Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp.

V.u. Denise Vandevoort, Prof . Van Overstraetenplein 1, 3000 Leuven