23 may 2022, Wouter van den Eijkel
Filip Vervaet in Galerie Ron Mandos: "I am very fascinated by that in-between space in which things transform."
For Inner Garden, Belgian artist Filip Vervaet transformed the back space of Galerie Ron Mandos into dimly lit parallel universe using 150 wooden plates and 6000 kilos of black sand. In the front room, De Wereld van Sofie can be seen with work by Ilse D'Hollander and Stef Driesen, Tatjana Gerhard and Leon Vranke, curated by Sofie van de Velde and Jason Poirier dit Caulier.
Vervaet's work has been shown in the Netherlands once before. At the beginning of this year, he presented a similar futuristic experience to visitors of the Amsterdam Flemish cultural centre De Brakke Grond. Many people will have missed that exhibition, because Cascade was on display for exactly four days. Then the pandemic threw a spanner in the works. “In fact, this is a transformed fragment from that show nobody saw,” says Vervaet.
Filip Vervaet, L' erosion, 2020, Galerie Ron Mandos
Gallerist Ron Mandos was one of the few people who saw Cascade and invited Vervaet for an exhibition. Vervaet's work fits in well with the programming of Galerie Ron Mandos, which often programmes artists who offer an immersive experience. Think of Joep van Lieshout’s macabre field hospital and the Japanese garden that Daniel Arsham installed a few years ago.
Transformation
Also for Vervaet (Belgium, 1973) scenography, the complete arrangement of spaces in which his work is displayed, is an integral part of his work: “I regard scenography somewhat as a scenario. You will partly help to decide how that viewing experience is further substantiated. It also ties the works together in a certain way.”
The moment you enter Vervaet’s Inner Garden you’ll notice how scenography influences the way in which you experience the works. Slowly sloshing through the 6 tons of black sand that has been poured over the gallery floor, you become aware of your own presence in this stylized reality. In the darkened room, the works are perfectly lit, so you can see them even more than in a stark white room. Vervaet: “I really like to play with the inside of things, the idea of the inside and the outside, and confuse those two concepts with each other. For me, the fact that you actually step into a space is a metaphor for entering a parallel world, where you end up in the 'inside' or in the mental space.”
Filip Vervaet, Fountain, 2017, Galerie Ron Mandos
Vervaet: “I like the metaphor of a dream world, where things come together, but in a certain order or and order that is not necessarily linear and not necessarily real, but where all those things come together. A state between day and night. I am very fascinated by that in-between space in which things transform. You can also compare this exhibition to an ethnographic museum where you look at things from a past, which you see behind glass or which have been fossilized. Maybe the same thing happens here, but with a sci-fi layer over it.”Sci-fi and clay
What kind of stylized interior do you actually end up in? A tranquil world in which people seem absent. The colour scheme and the sparse light make you feel like you're on the set of Kubrick's 2001 or big-budget sci-fi films such as the recent Bladerunner or Dune. Vervaet mixes sci-fi with archaic techniques, such as in the reliefs that are clearly made by hand, the housing of which is fitted with a colour filter or a dichroic coating. As a result, the viewer can never see the entire performance at once, but has to move each time to see the next piece.
Filip Vervaet, Waiting for the Sun, 2019, Galerie Ron Mandos
You can see this combination of arcane objects and modern techniques most clearly in the work Medusa (2019), a masterly but apparently simple work in which the transformation motif also returns. Draped on a man-sized boulder is a piece of silk that flutters in the wind from two fans. As a result, the colours in the silk sparkle in every direction. The reference to the Greek mythological figure Medusa (according to the myth everyone who looked at Medusa turned to stone) is, according to Vervaet, a “substantiating element” of this exhibition.
Filip Vervaet, Medusa, 2019, Galerie Ron Mandos
Landscape painter
These days, Vervaet regularly compares himself to a landscape painter. A surpring anand slighty provocative statement, but which certainly contains a kernel of truth. “From an art-historical point of view, landscape painters also composed landscapes themselves. They often did this from a reflection of what a landscape was like at the time and I think I am actually doing the same in this time, but only with sculpture. Someone like Kasper David Friedrich also wanted to create an experience, we share that.”
Vervaet does not compose his landscapes as a form of criticism, he is triggered by the ambiguous relationship between man and nature. “I am amazed at how we shape our environment: our gardens, parks, and the way we live. Are we still an animal then?”
Filip Vervaet, Strange Fruit, 2020, Galerie Ron Mandos
Many of the themes come together in the plant in the middle of the rear space. The plant consists of aluminum casts of the branches and leaves of 15 plant species. Some of these come from the Botanic Garden of Meise. The exotic plants were once brought from faraway places. “I contacted the gardener if I could help prune the exotic plants. I had alumimun casts made of them and I started to compose a new entity. The idea of the malleability of nature is in there, but also the notion of exoticism. How we appropriate exotic elements is something I find fascinating in human behaviour.”
Everything in Vervaet's dream worlds undergoes a slow transformation, including the black sand, which is the by-product of an industrial process.
