Patrick Vanden Eynde
10 Sep - 17 Oct 2009
PATRICK VANDEN EYNDE
September 10 - October 17, 2009
Letter to: Patrick Vanden Eynde
‘At the form of one’s shoes one recognizes the quality of someone’s tongue’. This quote by Dr. Martin von Ringleben uncontrollably came to mind when I saw your works with shoes such as ‘executive’ and ‘casual’. These smaller works to me portray a manifesto on the art of painting of Patrick Vanden Eynde. Painted objects isolated in an undefined space with an explicitly ironic emphasis on the texture, gloss and surface of the object. In addition to being every-day objects, shoes are also objects of seduction and status. In its illusory relationship with reality (and with photography), the art of painting at times also has the option to wander and to seduce. It is therefore no surprise that your visual material, or the iconographic cornerstones of your larger works, were drawn from all sorts of magazines. From the fleeting and transitory abundance of images in magazines you filter images which in my mind relate to the decor of our consumption society: among other exotic plants, design, chairs, lighting objects, animals (dogs) and recording equipment. Each and every piece is an item accompanying life away from a necessity, masking and embellishing the void. In your works these props are reduced to shapes, peeled symbols torn from their context. From the edge they are yanked into the centre of a painting experience. They become archaeological finds of today sorted according to an intuitive logic in painting. Every painted object provides a different mental entrance to the painted collage. The scale of things becomes the state of affairs of painting. Though the paintings were composed associatively from figurative elements, the canvases have an abstract quality. The point of view of a true painter is hiding behind the at times unusual associations of objects. No problem is articulated on the status of an image. Painting the prostheses of our society rather becomes an incentive to control a plane, bring rhythm in the composition and lose oneself in the matter of painting. A bee and its humming are physically closer than a guitar playing Hendrix. In fact, when constructing your compositions you are using techniques typical to the methods of advertising, typical to the speed of digital manipulations. And yet you choose the lingering gesture of painting, the material precision. The painting as a skin made of both the fur of a dog and the veneer of a wooden table, as well as the fluffy down of a magnified insect. The intuitively seeking construction of the compositions can be guessed from the pentimenti to be found in the canvases. From the shimmer of the monochrome background every now and then a play of lines emerges of an object which had taken up a larger or smaller place elsewhere in the plane. Behind the apposite articulation of the works, lies a process accentuating the origin of the painting. For that matter, each time I experience your works they are to me invariably connected with a sound intensity or a certain sonority. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that a recording device in the shape of a microphone should be present in almost every work. As if the floating, undefined space itself absorbs the silence of painting.
Philippe Van Cauteren, Ghent, September 2009
September 10 - October 17, 2009
Letter to: Patrick Vanden Eynde
‘At the form of one’s shoes one recognizes the quality of someone’s tongue’. This quote by Dr. Martin von Ringleben uncontrollably came to mind when I saw your works with shoes such as ‘executive’ and ‘casual’. These smaller works to me portray a manifesto on the art of painting of Patrick Vanden Eynde. Painted objects isolated in an undefined space with an explicitly ironic emphasis on the texture, gloss and surface of the object. In addition to being every-day objects, shoes are also objects of seduction and status. In its illusory relationship with reality (and with photography), the art of painting at times also has the option to wander and to seduce. It is therefore no surprise that your visual material, or the iconographic cornerstones of your larger works, were drawn from all sorts of magazines. From the fleeting and transitory abundance of images in magazines you filter images which in my mind relate to the decor of our consumption society: among other exotic plants, design, chairs, lighting objects, animals (dogs) and recording equipment. Each and every piece is an item accompanying life away from a necessity, masking and embellishing the void. In your works these props are reduced to shapes, peeled symbols torn from their context. From the edge they are yanked into the centre of a painting experience. They become archaeological finds of today sorted according to an intuitive logic in painting. Every painted object provides a different mental entrance to the painted collage. The scale of things becomes the state of affairs of painting. Though the paintings were composed associatively from figurative elements, the canvases have an abstract quality. The point of view of a true painter is hiding behind the at times unusual associations of objects. No problem is articulated on the status of an image. Painting the prostheses of our society rather becomes an incentive to control a plane, bring rhythm in the composition and lose oneself in the matter of painting. A bee and its humming are physically closer than a guitar playing Hendrix. In fact, when constructing your compositions you are using techniques typical to the methods of advertising, typical to the speed of digital manipulations. And yet you choose the lingering gesture of painting, the material precision. The painting as a skin made of both the fur of a dog and the veneer of a wooden table, as well as the fluffy down of a magnified insect. The intuitively seeking construction of the compositions can be guessed from the pentimenti to be found in the canvases. From the shimmer of the monochrome background every now and then a play of lines emerges of an object which had taken up a larger or smaller place elsewhere in the plane. Behind the apposite articulation of the works, lies a process accentuating the origin of the painting. For that matter, each time I experience your works they are to me invariably connected with a sound intensity or a certain sonority. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that a recording device in the shape of a microphone should be present in almost every work. As if the floating, undefined space itself absorbs the silence of painting.
Philippe Van Cauteren, Ghent, September 2009