andriesse~eyck gallery welcomes the new year with a group exhibition exploring word as an image, with works by Carel Blotkamp, Marijn van Kreij, Kim van Norren, Joyce Overheul, Rory Pilgrim, Allen Ruppersberg, P. Struycken and Jan Vercruysse.
An old saying tells that “one picture is worth a thousand words”.
Still, one often finds themself reading an informative text besides the picture. The viewer relies on the idea that a text’s legibility is essential for making meaning, that without it, the pictorial stays partially unexplainable. A distinction is made between looking and reading. How does such a distinction act when the text enters the canvas, when the text becomes a part of the picture?
Ever since Picasso and Braque introduced newspaper clippings into their still-lives, the aesthetic potential of a word has not been ignored. It became apparent that the written word is simultaneously material, appealing, and malleable. Artists had started to position language as its own pictorial form, and the written word suddenly became equally important as the painted image.
Woorden Weelde explores words in images, words about images, words with images, and ultimately, words as images.