In her work, Philine Vanrafelghem (°1985, Roeselare) explores the relationship between textile and architecture. Architect and art theorist Gottfried Semper (1803 – 1879) believed that the origin of architecture (initially a place of shelter and protection) could be connected to the utility of textile (humankind wore clothes as a means of protection). According to his ‘principle of coverage’, the woven carpet was used as a floor or hung up to function as a wall. Horizontal and vertical patterns in Vanrafelghem’s work refer to fabric, tissue, windows, stone facades, and curtains. The patterns shift in a subtle manner, the result of a thorough process of sketching on tracing paper. Different maps and patterns are layered on top of each other. This way, textile and architecture coincide and intertwine creating a distinct vocabulary. This vocabulary is used by the artist to explore and question the boundaries of representation. Vanrafelghem emphasizes shape, color, and the surface of the canvas, as her transparent way of painting gives the untreated cotton canvas a decisive role in the image. She presents her paintings by draping them, rolling them up and folding them. By doing so, they are brought into a new relationship with their surrounding space.
In her recent series Wand Gewand Mauer (2022-….), Vanrafelghem elaborates Semper’s “principle of covering”. With this principle, the theorist made a distinction between the carrying and the space-separating function of walls. According to Semper, the carpet formed the visible wall (in German ‘die Wand’, a word that has the same etymological origin as ‘das Gewand’ or ‘the garment’), while the stone wall merely had a carrying function (in German ‘die Mauer’). This theory was Vanrafelghem’s inspiration for a series focusing on the relationship between ‘die Wand’ and ‘die Mauer’, interior and exterior, the visible and the invisible. Instead of stressing the decorativeness of ‘die Wand’, however, she examines the decorativeness of ‘die Mauer’: plaster, masonry, wood, reinforcement, and concrete are dissected layer by layer, scaled and then placed on top of each other until a new decorative pattern emerges.
With Wand Gewand Mauer, Vanrafelghem places architecture (a concept often affiliated with masculinity) and textile (a concept often affiliated with feminitity) in a gender-related context. After all, the paintings are based on specific houses such as Alvar Aalto’s villa Mairea and Adolf Loos’ villa Müller, in which the action of looking and the sexuality of space play an important role. The way these villas are designed conditions the process of viewing. The female gaze is directed to spaces distinct from those captured and controlled by the male gaze. Femininity is brought in connection with the interior and the inner mechanisms of the house. The man’s gaze is directed towards the outside world, he is in control over what happens in the house and who enters it. In her diptychs, Vanrafelghem steadily deconstructs these stereotypical spatial structures and turns them into transcending, transspatial patterns.