Koenraad Dedobbeleer
22 Sep - 12 Nov 2011
KOENRAAD DEDOBBELEER
Goopd Plans Are Made by Hand
22 September - 12 November, 2011
Koenraad Dedobbeleer bases his work on a close and very subjective observation of urban reality and architecture. The artist appropriates forms and objects that he comes across in his daily life environment, submitting them to often minimal alterations, either through the materials he uses in their re-creation, their association with other objects and forms, alterations in their scale or the use of colour. His works are not ready-mades, but subtle re-appropriations of existing objects. Dedobbeleer is interested in how an object or an idea can undergo status changes and simultaneously exist within different realities and interpretations.
According to French curator Thomas Boutoux: ‘At the heart of Dedobbeleer’s practice lies this displacement of the environmental condition and function of the referential object from an urban network of things and practices to the gallery space, which carries its own characteristics and logic as a system of objects and relationships. [...] Dedobbeleer’s practice is not literally site-specific: his sculptures do not derive from an analytical approach of a certain location or context, and they have been very clearly imagined, first and foremost, for their consubstantial formal qualities as sculptures. Yet, it is at the moment of their installation in the gallery – in the way they are positioned and adjusted within an exhibition in relation to a specific site and within a particular constellation of objects – that his objects become articulate as they delimit, define and enrich the location and what occupies it with energies, relationships and possible significances. It is at such moments, when Dedobbeleer’s sculptures integrate and determine a new system of items and procedures, that his work becomes functional, not just as a tool for reading the space but also, by extension – as it forces us to dwell on formal transformations through contextual changes – to understand the complexities of the familiar and the naturalised’.
Good Plans Are Made By Hand, Dedobbeleer’s second intervention at ProjecteSD, presents a group of his most recent works. Notions such as object and documentation, contents or meaning as affected by display, the idea of a sculpture as carrier of information, memory, or even as an obstacle, are found in this presentation. Untitled (Table by Dimitri Van Grunderbeek) displays a copy of What You Carry in You the Bastards can’t Touch - the artist’s latest publication - on a wooden table created by Belgian artist Dimitri Van Grunderbeek. The publication compiles a series photographs taken at Van Grunderbeek’s house and studio. Its title suggests the impossibility of stealing, destroying or annihilating what one carries inside, being information, knowledge or cultural specificities.
This conception is also contained in other works like The Present Is Compounded Like Baklava, which reminds a symbol, a pre-language form of significance, or in Contemporary Is the Man, not Style, a print of a genealogical chart where the information has been distorted and is presented in the form of incomprehensible symbols, meaningless at first glance, though containing information open to subjective interpretation. Works like Creating Equivalents to Appearances or Obsolete Instruments of State or Commerce function as containers of cultural references that have been extracted from their contexts, re-dimensioned and placed in the space of the gallery. Quote Somebody with a Different Point of View, an inverted ice-cream cone, contains the potentiality of the object’s spiral movement; its shape is the possibility of its movement. Ideas Can Be Thought and Against Your Time act like panels where some type of information is displayed. The nature of this information is not easily identifiable, although we can recognise some of its elements. You Sing about what I Made, a 6x7 slide projection, shows pictures of a certain lifestyle that is about to disappear, projected using an artefact that is no longer in use, providing information about the recent past, making present what is to become a memory.
Goopd Plans Are Made by Hand
22 September - 12 November, 2011
Koenraad Dedobbeleer bases his work on a close and very subjective observation of urban reality and architecture. The artist appropriates forms and objects that he comes across in his daily life environment, submitting them to often minimal alterations, either through the materials he uses in their re-creation, their association with other objects and forms, alterations in their scale or the use of colour. His works are not ready-mades, but subtle re-appropriations of existing objects. Dedobbeleer is interested in how an object or an idea can undergo status changes and simultaneously exist within different realities and interpretations.
According to French curator Thomas Boutoux: ‘At the heart of Dedobbeleer’s practice lies this displacement of the environmental condition and function of the referential object from an urban network of things and practices to the gallery space, which carries its own characteristics and logic as a system of objects and relationships. [...] Dedobbeleer’s practice is not literally site-specific: his sculptures do not derive from an analytical approach of a certain location or context, and they have been very clearly imagined, first and foremost, for their consubstantial formal qualities as sculptures. Yet, it is at the moment of their installation in the gallery – in the way they are positioned and adjusted within an exhibition in relation to a specific site and within a particular constellation of objects – that his objects become articulate as they delimit, define and enrich the location and what occupies it with energies, relationships and possible significances. It is at such moments, when Dedobbeleer’s sculptures integrate and determine a new system of items and procedures, that his work becomes functional, not just as a tool for reading the space but also, by extension – as it forces us to dwell on formal transformations through contextual changes – to understand the complexities of the familiar and the naturalised’.
Good Plans Are Made By Hand, Dedobbeleer’s second intervention at ProjecteSD, presents a group of his most recent works. Notions such as object and documentation, contents or meaning as affected by display, the idea of a sculpture as carrier of information, memory, or even as an obstacle, are found in this presentation. Untitled (Table by Dimitri Van Grunderbeek) displays a copy of What You Carry in You the Bastards can’t Touch - the artist’s latest publication - on a wooden table created by Belgian artist Dimitri Van Grunderbeek. The publication compiles a series photographs taken at Van Grunderbeek’s house and studio. Its title suggests the impossibility of stealing, destroying or annihilating what one carries inside, being information, knowledge or cultural specificities.
This conception is also contained in other works like The Present Is Compounded Like Baklava, which reminds a symbol, a pre-language form of significance, or in Contemporary Is the Man, not Style, a print of a genealogical chart where the information has been distorted and is presented in the form of incomprehensible symbols, meaningless at first glance, though containing information open to subjective interpretation. Works like Creating Equivalents to Appearances or Obsolete Instruments of State or Commerce function as containers of cultural references that have been extracted from their contexts, re-dimensioned and placed in the space of the gallery. Quote Somebody with a Different Point of View, an inverted ice-cream cone, contains the potentiality of the object’s spiral movement; its shape is the possibility of its movement. Ideas Can Be Thought and Against Your Time act like panels where some type of information is displayed. The nature of this information is not easily identifiable, although we can recognise some of its elements. You Sing about what I Made, a 6x7 slide projection, shows pictures of a certain lifestyle that is about to disappear, projected using an artefact that is no longer in use, providing information about the recent past, making present what is to become a memory.