Until 26 February, Base-Alpha Gallery in Antwerp is showing a solo exhibition by Soetkin Verslype. It includes a number of paintings that invite the viewer to look at everyday reality with fresh eyes.
Contemporary objects are given a new life through the eyes of the Belgian artist Soetkin Verslype. The images in her stylised renderings often have a basis in reality and are based on everyday objects, collections, photos, elements from her travels — for instance a market in Burkina Faso — but also specific arrangements in window displays. She usually works in a predetermined colour scheme, which is not related to the original colour of the depicted object.
Her works are not narrative in nature and the resulting paintings have an analytical and fragmented quality, as if you are looking at an abstract puzzle, full of rhythmically ordered surfaces. The images are playful and instantly recognisable, but at the same time, they contain something fragile. Foreground and background seamlessly intertwine in Verslype's compositions, in a kind of warped perspective.
Verslype: “I use colour and play with the ways I can translate my three-dimensional environment to a flat surface to create ambiguous situations that make everyday sceneries look atypical and strange. I’m flattening what isn’t flat and combining what should be separate by using colour combinations that bring different materials together. This technique allows me to play with positive and negative forms, creating interactions between shapes that in reality could be at a large distance from each other. The sky can now relate to a cup in a very different way, or a shoe to a flower.”
Verslype works in an intuitive way. She prefers gouache, because of its matte finish and quick-drying quality. The moment you want to add a new layer to it, the paint is reactivated. That impedes overpainting, effectively forcing the maker to make quick, intuitive decisions. Overanalysing is then no longer an option. The artist is also interested in the ways in which materials age, for example through prolonged exposure to UV radiation.