FREEK WAMBACQ
19.02 – 04.04.2009
Panneaux de Titrage, Still lives, A Turn to Music.
In his oeuvre Freek Wambacq (b.1978) shows a remarkable sensitivity for the changing status of everyday objects. With an apparently obvious ease he detects unsuspected forms of sculpturality in life as it (sometimes) is: a near endless joining together of objects that appear as merchandise, as trophy, as prototype, as specimen, as epitomy of taste – even if they were carelessly plopped down somewhere – while radiating something that might refer to an ideal of intrinsic beauty. It is often about situations from the twilight zone between banal and special: specific moments that Wambacq applies to explore the corridor between art and non-art, as a repositioning that is often as trivial as it is significant.
That subtlety is not only visible in the care (and the technical baggage) with which he sets-out and presents works, but also in the unexpressed humour that emerges as the fixed ‘decorum of things’ receives a staggering blow. In this exhibition Freek Wambacq presents a number of ‘real’ still lifes that play on the sensitivities of the trusted ‘nature-morte’. This genre, which is perhaps all too easily described as a pictorial genre, forms the motive for showing a collection of objects that are notable at first glance by their heterogeneity: as if it is about the world of associations that are summoned by their minimal physical presence. Their common denominator lets itself be concluded from the titles, or, better put, from the sounds that the objects are able to issue: the hoofs of a galloping horse (coconut halves on glass), the bang of a pistol that has been fired (the metal clasp of a clipboard) or the beating wings of a bird flying-by (gloves) – onomatopoeias that are more recognisable on tape than the real sound.
In this exhibition it again depends on how an image is read – with added emphasis on the graphic image of the black saw blades on the back wall. The accompanying text points not accidentally in the direction of cinema, and in particular to the uncultivated twists in the fixed connections between image and sound. Also the undulating chain of fictive film titles seen at the ground floor level points in the same direction, although here the full production process is at once placed between brackets. At the very same moment it is the form of a title – or the fraction of time in which you look and read simultaneously – that allows for the subtleties of a feature film to unfold.
Freek Wambacq is a Belgian artist living in Brussels with a career in full bloom. He has presented in Etablissement d’en face, the KunstNu space in SMAK, the poetry summer in Watou, amongs other places. Last November he was selected by SMAK to realise a solo show in Artissima, the art fair in Turin. Further to this, he has recently been selected for the prestigious Ariane De Rothschild prize, a solo show in Netwerk Aalst, and to participate in the exhibition in the Künstlerhaus in Dortmund.
Bram Van Damme