Within his practice, Tim Mathijsen investigates how humans attach meaning and value to objects, images and symbols. By displaying prints of facades and public sculptures or copies of murals in plaster, he extracts images from particular social contexts, placing them within a new.During a solo presentation at WIELS, Brussels, for example, Mathijsen hung a small piece of a large fresco on the wall. The image, two doves on a feeder, was originally part of a large mural in a Horta villa. While dining at the restored Art Nouveau villa, Mathijsen took a picture of the pigeons and copied it onto plaster using a fresco technique. The act of copying, or replacing context, is, not entirely innocent. By extracting the image of an object and placing it within a new context, Mathijsen changes its meaning; he erases the actual purpose and usefulness of the object in order to have new ones given to it. This act is similar to what George Bataille called making abundance; as in an animal sacrifice, you take something that is useful to a society and entertain it into something that is no longer useful; bring it into a new conceptual realm.