RICHARD VENLET
Richard Venlet’s work has focused for a number of years now on making ‘presentational frames’ developed in relation to contexts and situations from outside. He uses a pragmatically reduced language of form to create interventions, pieces or installations that give a prominent role to existing architectural structures and exhibition spaces. He is in a conscious search for stratification within what is ‘concrete’ and what is under the surface or physically present. In so doing he zooms in on customs, architectural details, objects and other forms of content. All of this is enlarged and mentally projected, forcing the viewer to question his/her way of looking at the complexity of the everyday, and to experience it in a more conscious manner. Venlet’s work is always about a structure that allows, or even forces you to accumulate content, in various layers, by various players. Not only has Venlet spent a long time on the exhibition space as a physical space, but also on the way we behave in it. His work invites the viewer – often in a unobtrusive way – to become an ‘actor’. Not an actor in the sense of merely moving, but also someone who is moved by his/her environment, who receives impulses and is shaped by them.