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Antwerp-based drawer, ceramicist, installationist, and now film maker Rinus Van de Velde defines his work as “fictional autobiography”.
To the core a studio artist, four white walls are, for him, liberating rather than constraining as the space to imagine limitless possibilities for the fictional self he explores in various media.
He began with black and white charcoal drawings, placing himself in imaginary settings. He then created the sets of his daydreams using paint and cardboard, had himself photographed within them, and in turn drew the results, often complementing them with lines of enigmatic text.
The next natural step is film that transports us into his dream world, at once familiar and strange, with people who are “here together alone”.
His three films – “The Villagers”, “La Ruta Natural” and “A Life in a Day” – are the subject of a hefty volume meticulously produced by Hannibal Books, the book of the films being another logical progression.
It is accompanied by a vinyl disc of the minimal, haunting soundtrack of awkward leaps rather than easy melodic sequences by another Antwerp artist Joachim Badenhorst.
A text by German writer and musician Timon Karl Kaleyta aids our appreciation of Van de Velde’s approach that is at once playful and sombre, more puzzling than parodic; rather than despairing, it relishes human artistry and imagination. Laconic, evocative and apolitical, it’s also a refreshing contrast in times when the internet is littered with unsubtle attacks and AI-generated verbiage.
“FILMS,” the book, gives insight into how Van de Velde spent two years working on 17 life-size cardboard sets for “The Villagers”, a title that suggests it would be self-important to imply that its denizens of uncertain purpose are part of any grander community.
For “La Ruta Natural”, a palindrome appropriate to the circularity of a journey that begins and ends with the self, Van de Velde made a mask resembling his face.
His subsequent film “A Life in a Day” widens the gap between the real-life artist and his fictions as both he and we undertake a journey along subterranean corridors into a vault containing wall after wall of identical drawers and then back to the surface for it all to begin again.
Just as the artist revisits his subject, the reader/viewer may repeatedly return to this book and to the films that inspired it, as Van de Velde’s fecund aesthetic journey goes on and on.
Films
Rinus Van de Velde
Published by Hannibal Books
Antwerp-based drawer, ceramicist, installationist, and now film maker Rinus Van de Velde defines his work as “fictional autobiography”.
To the core a studio artist, four white walls are, for him, liberating rather than constraining as the space to imagine limitless possibilities for the fictional self he explores in various media.
He began with black and white charcoal drawings, placing himself in imaginary settings. He then created the sets of his daydreams using paint and cardboard, had himself photographed within them, and in turn drew the results, often complementing them with lines of enigmatic text.
The next natural step is film that transports us into his dream world, at once familiar and strange, with people who are “here together alone”.
His three films – “The Villagers”, “La Ruta Natural” and “A Life in a Day” – are the subject of a hefty volume meticulously produced by Hannibal Books, the book of the films being another logical progression.
It is accompanied by a vinyl disc of the minimal, haunting soundtrack of awkward leaps rather than easy melodic sequences by another Antwerp artist Joachim Badenhorst.
A text by German writer and musician Timon Karl Kaleyta aids our appreciation of Van de Velde’s approach that is at once playful and sombre, more puzzling than parodic; rather than despairing, it relishes human artistry and imagination. Laconic, evocative and apolitical, it’s also a refreshing contrast in times when the internet is littered with unsubtle attacks and AI-generated verbiage.
“FILMS,” the book, gives insight into how Van de Velde spent two years working on 17 life-size cardboard sets for “The Villagers”, a title that suggests it would be self-important to imply that its denizens of uncertain purpose are part of any grander community.
For “La Ruta Natural”, a palindrome appropriate to the circularity of a journey that begins and ends with the self, Van de Velde made a mask resembling his face.
His subsequent film “A Life in a Day” widens the gap between the real-life artist and his fictions as both he and we undertake a journey along subterranean corridors into a vault containing wall after wall of identical drawers and then back to the surface for it all to begin again.
Just as the artist revisits his subject, the reader/viewer may repeatedly return to this book and to the films that inspired it, as Van de Velde’s fecund aesthetic journey goes on and on.
Barbara Lewis © 2024.
By Barbara Lewis • art, books, drawing, installations, year 2024 • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, drawing, film, installations