11 june 2024, Wouter van den Eijkel
A puzzle of language and pavement tiles | Josse Pyl - One ‘O’ Hanging Between Two i’s
Explaining one's own work is never easy. Explaining conceptual work is even more challenging. And explaining conceptual work to a group of children may very well be the most difficult of all. Josse But Pyl needed less than a minute to do so during Amsterdam Art Week. In short sentences, he explained what his work is all about: "This exhibition revolves around the idea of making a mark. When you bite into an apple or step in the sand and leave a trace, you also leave a sign. You do the same when you write. If you look around the exhibition, you’ll see all kinds of imprints or traces of symbols and signs left on parts of a building. The show is about the question of when is something a sign and when is something a letter?"
This clear explanation is indicative of an artist who is building a body of work that stands apart from current events and trends, making it impossible to simply refer to similar work or widespread ideas. Perhaps it is due to the uniquely playful yet compelling logic that characterises his work, enabling Pyl (Belgium, 1991) to successfully convey his ideas with such simplicity.
For the group of primary school-aged children, Pyl kept his explanation at that, but the question he presents to the adult viewer is embedded within: when does looking become reading and when does reading become looking? The title of the exhibition, One ‘O’ Hanging Between Two i’s, is a good example of this. If you read the two i’s as eyes, the O must be a mouth. Visually, the letters iOi then also form a small face, especially if you use subscript for the O. To Pyl, language is a puzzle, a game that generates meaning.
Josse Pyl, Is That That What Is Is,, 2024, Annet Gelink Gallery
A sentence of broken tongues
Two weeks earlier, in his studio in a former technical school just outside Amsterdam's ring road, Pyl elaborated on the exhibition. His exhibitions typically take the form of an installation, tailored entirely to the exhibition space. For his first solo exhibition at Annet Gelink Gallery, Pyl makes optimal use of the partition walls between the front and back space.
In the front space on either side of the passage to the back space, lie broken casts of tongues. Together they form a sentence, according to Pyl. On the back wall, around ten meters away, we see two large arches of dark red brick. In these, you can see an upper and lower jaw, because just like on an X-ray of a set of teeth, the arches are interrupted in various places. But the pieces of two, three, four or more bricks with casts of molars on them can also be read as a sentence or thought expressed with short pauses. In other words, you can also view the arches as a metaphor for the mouth as a gateway between thought and utterance, between internal and external. The work is therefore called Three points between two brackets.
Josse Pyl, C AN TH E ARM YM IN D., 2024, Annet Gelink Gallery
Familiar territory
With the subject of language and the mouth as a gateway, Pyl is on familiar ground. Mouths, tongues and molars regularly appear in his work. His characteristic curling script without interruption can also be seen in several works, as well as cartoon figures, such as the little man with a globe for a head singing in the universal language of music: musical notation.
New are the chess pieces, such as the bishops that appear in the work Forefortherefore. The bishops not only resemble Pyl's molars, but in a broader sense, chess is a form of communication you can learn to read. The same goes for the letters A, B, C in the work As So Then This, which are linked with a padlock. Only when you learn to read does the lock open. Until then, they remain mere signs.
Josse Pyl, As So Then This, 2024, Annet Gelink Gallery
Pyl's development can be well sketched out using the carriers he uses to explore our language landscape. He frequently switches between supporting materials, often preferring functional and industrial materials.
Pyl attended the Rijksakademie (2017-2018), where he translated his drawing process into tangible forms and expressed them in physical spaces. His research into language patterns resulted in moulds and cast forms that were turned into an alphabet of reliefs, which were then placed on the walls of exhibition spaces. As a result, the network behind the construction of the world was engraved in the architecture. Symbols and thoughts emerged from the walls, transforming the environment into a linguistic space.
A few years later, Annet Gelink Gallery took his work to Art Rotterdam. In addition to these specific works, Pyl used the frottage technique to translate the motifs and themes of these works onto paper. He made frottages by placing paper on various elements of his artwork and rubbing over the surface of the paper with a pencil, causing the shadows of the original works to appear on the paper. This resulted in an artist's book in which language emerges from the objects it tries to represent, forming a shadow of reality.
The meandering script first appeared in Pyl's exhibition at De Brakke Grond, the Flemish cultural centre in Amsterdam, where he adorned eight round columns with circular script. The idea of a broken sentence also took the form of an installation consisting of the curling script on broken concrete blocks in The Bakery – the small space in the gallery – and later in the waiting room of the former train station of Seoul. By using the architectural vocabulary of the building, he transformed these walls into communicative artifacts, with symbols and thoughts engraved in their materiality. This resulted in a sentence of reliefs spread throughout the space in which the message was simultaneously transcribed and distorted—just as our tongues and teeth form words before they are released into the world.
Last year, Pyl created the triptych An 'I' with Two Feet, and a Hat on glass using a technique found in early Disney animations called multiplane animation. This technique makes it possible to suggest movement by overlaying images on multiple glass plates. He also made a small series of works on low-density polyethylene (similar to cutting boards).
Josse Pyl, Forefortherefore, 2024, Annet Gelink Gallery
For One ‘O’ Hanging Between Two i’s, Pyl used pavement tiles as a base, an obvious carrier of imprints in public space. In the work Forefortherefore, the tiles are laid out in a chessboard pattern, adding an extra dimension to the representation. In the other works, they appear to function merely as carriers of the imprint, but nothing could be further from the truth. At first glance, Pyl appears to use the pavement tiles as a modular system that can be configured in an infinite number of ways, but because one image often takes up multiple tiles, the works also resemble a puzzle that can only be laid in only one way. "The notion that an imprint is a kind of puzzle appeals to me. It fits well with the idea I am exploring, namely that language is a puzzle or a game."
One ‘O’ Hanging Between Two i’s by Josse Pyl can be seen at Annet Gelink Gallery Amsterdam until 13 July.
Josse Pyl, One 'O' hanging between two I'd, Annet Gelink Gallery
