ART ROTTERDAM 2023: we're happy to present a duo show w/ works by CHARLIE DE VOET and JOOST PAUWAERT.
Joost Pauwaert (BE, °1985) loves heavy wooden and metal machines and objects such as anvils, cannons and giant saw blades. He makes the machines himself, starting from technical challenges. Can he make a heavy anvil balance on a spring? Or catapult it and catch it in a funnel? Can he make his own cannon? Or make two cannons fire at each other simultaneously so that the cannonballs hit each other and deform? The artistic beauty of these ventures derives from the originality of the questions, on the opposite side of the usual forms of artistic expression.
Actually, they precede and take us back to times when science and art were closer to each other than today. Or they lead us back to fundamental questions in sculpture, which always had to do with gravity and density. Here we come closer to a fundamental poetry, which stems from the beauty of things themselves.
Charlie De Voet (BE, 1977) often shows occasional, temporary series of several individual works right next to one another, in order to let them interact with each other, with the space or with the audience. Thus they appear as confined, rythmic units or collectives that seem to bear and enhance a logic, a message and/or a poetry of their own. Recently the focus in his work evolved to handle the paint as a matter instead of a colour and how it responds as an excessive multi layering.
Much in the same way as with the swirling ocean, we’re struck by the infinite vastness of the monochrome paintings by Charlie De Voet. Degrades fading from light to dark, painted wet to wet in oil paint, are the result of a labour- intensive and, in the words of the artist, “near meditative process”. His deep pools mirror the impotence of the speechless human being: “The frame of a painting allows me to make an attempt at true communication within this boundary”. His paintings are of an overwhelming simplicity, as a counterweight to a world in which the artist experiences too many stimuli. Letting go is not unimportant for the painter of mental landscapes, rooted in matter.