MARIUS RITIU
Marius Ritiu is a sculptor, painter and storyteller whose practice questions the concepts of nationhood, borders and nationalism. Ritiu’s works often incorporate copper as the physical material that connects the world. The technological applications of the material in communication and transport have enabled and increased the mobility of ideas, goods and people, impacting the nature and physicality of borders.
The fiction, non-fiction and science-fiction of objects that come crashing in from a sky that might not just be, let alone have, a ceiling, is what provides the copper-centric
sculptures from Marius Ritiu’s ongoing Sisyphus series with its proper myth.
Somewhere under the sky (Sisyphus Part VIII), the latest and eighth installment of these stone from space look-alikes was assigned a spot in the garden of Antwerp’s cathedral.
It is not just the sculpture itself – which this time looks less like a compressed asteroid than a cartoon of a Serra struck by lightning – that adds to the vocabularium of the former works in the series. But also the site specifically and the inescapable church in contrast that deepens Ritiu’s exploration of scale’s suspense. Rather than perfect artistry, here’s artistry with perfect ends to it. Dedicating a practice, you could say, to a boredom of borders, the artistic paradox Ritiu seems to deal with is that it takes gigantesque
blockages, borderline invasions in cramped galleries or public spaces, to show that we are little, and art is little, and perhaps all is relative.
EMILIE TERLINDEN
The mystifying paintings of Emilie Terlinden emerge through a careful selection of images from the Renaissance and objects from her everyday environment. Though the images remain recognizable to the viewer as references to a specific era, a series of careful
manipulations makes them entirely the artist’s own. Before being given their fixed place on the canvas, the images are transformed by being folded, alienating them from their original form. These interventions strip the subjects of their familiar historical context and promote them to be protagonists in a new, sophisticated staged spectacle.
The artist’s controlled painting technique completes the abstraction. Her working method
combines a wide variety of technical actions that make time itself an important factor in Terlinden’s process. The time that elapses between the different steps in the artistic process enhances the final effect of the artist’s works, in which the images used literally lose their time.
The series of paintings shown at Art Antwerp takes cut-out images from reproductions of Johannes Vermeer’s paintings A Maid Asleep, Woman Holding a Balance and
Girl with a Flute which recently are no longer attributed to Vermeer; Altarpiece The Seven Sacraments by Rogier van der Weyden, The Adoration of the Kings and The Peasant
Wedding by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. These cut-outs are coated with glue, folded, staged and photographed against a dark background by candlelight. The resulting photographs are used as subjects for the paintings.