Press Release
In 2001 Jan De Cock (born in 1976, in Etterbeek, Belgium) presented his first space-filling installation in Playstation, the project space of Galerie Fons Welters. A series of monumental changes to the public space and the museum institution followed. De Cock produced the series Denkmal (alluding to the German word for monument, but also to a literal mal for denken, sign for thought) with an intense collaborative effort in situ, heavily influenced by modernist predecessors and ideas in museums like the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and over the past year in Bozar, Brussels.
Now, nine years later, Jan De Cock has traded in the public workspace of the exhibition room for the seclusion of the studio. For his solo exhibition Repromotion, he has turned inwards. Rather than taking the architecture of the surrounding space or art institutions as his point of departure, autonomous sculptural volumes now play the primary role. Another major role goes to a new series of monumental photography of ruins in the former war zone of the Balkan. A landscape of separate sculptures unfolds in the gallery, which playfully take possession of the space, alternating with collages of photographic reproductions of his own work that literally bear the imprint of the workspace within them. Form, colour, and scale, as minimal basic elements create a complex rhythmicity. This is the formal and conceptual point of departure for the De Cock’s sculpture.
Whereas the grid of horizontal and vertical lines formed the core element of the spatial impact of his earlier installations, here it is the diagonal that determines the orientation. The large pedestal-like sculptures in the familiar brown-varnished chipboard are placed on their points and supported by a structure of steel bars, painted green. Raised off the floor, the volumes appear more self-contained, they occupy the space autonomously, and do not enter into dialogue with the gallery space until they are installed there. The rhythms of columns, openings and sheets are fragmented, but at the same time make up a strong aesthetic unity.
The figures in Repromotion enter into a new symbiosis, the imagery of which has its roots in the ten years of De Cock’s ‘fieldwork’ and derives its complexity not from any extensive reference system, but from within. In this way, the highly specific, personal definition of space and beauty that Jan De Cock has developed over the past ten years now enters a new dimension.
Text by Laurie Cluitmans.
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