William Evertson is one of the three artists who make up the Seeking Kali collective, featured previously on this blog. Recently, the three artists met up in Belgium and France, and they kindly agreed to write up their visit for me. In Part 1, William Evertson describes what he saw in Leuven and Brussels. Tomowwo, in part 2, Susan Shulman writes about the Parisian part of the trip.
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| From left: Susan Shulman, William Evertson, Ria Vnden Eynde. |
The Seeking Kali artist collective
consists of me, Ria Vanden Eynde, and Susan Shulman. We live in three
different countries and collaborate via social media and web tools. We
rarely see each other in person, but we recently returned from Europe from our
second ever get together, during which we combined some art business with
cramming as many art exhibitions and museums into two weeks as possible.
One of
the first exhibits to catch our eye was Belgian artist Christoph
Fink’s “Atlas of Movements” at the M – Museum Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. We
met up with Christoph as he was documenting his installation on its final day.
Fink draws upon an obsessive attention to the details of travel experiences as
the inspiration for his work. In fact much of the exhibit consists of elaborately
annotated notebooks detailing the facts of each trip the artist makes, either
on foot, by bicycle, car, train or plane. In addition, Fink makes a variety of
physical representations of his travels, sometimes consisting of elaborate
translations in wire combining landscape features with the artist’s actual
path. The wire pieces, while having a wonderful calligraphic freedom,
also function as a reference to his notebooks by means of tiny numbered tags
affixed to the construction.
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| "The Montreal Walks," Christophe Fink |
Also on exhibit were his latest ceramic disc
pieces. These white porcelain discus-shaped objects are printed with symbols,
lines and numbers. By cross-referencing the numbers with the notebooks we learn
that he is interested in detailing very subjective details from everything he
experiences, such as clouds, smells, feelings.
Christoph’s
installation is part of various exhibits themed to coincide with the 500th
anniversary of Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator’s birth. Like Mercator,
he seeks to build sculptural atlases combining and detailing the increasing
complexity of our description and knowledge of the physical world with his
subjective experience of it.
Cy Twombly’s photographic works at
BOZAR in Brussels was a reminder why he has always been an intriguing yet an
elusive artist. These works, which derive from Polaroid photos, are
manipulated on a color copier then presented as dryprints sized about twice
that of the standard Polaroid. Twombly selected slightly more than 100 of
these works prior to his death this past July.
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| Brushes, by Cy Twombly |
Although the artist worked
with Polaroids his entire career, they were not publicly exhibited until the
1990s and have remained an obscure part of his oeuvre until now. The
often fuzzy and abstract feel of the images derive both the close up nature of
the subject matter and the artist’s decision to eschew the autofocus
feature. The subject matter varies: still-life images of flowers and brushes,
snap shots of his studio and museums interiors, details from his paintings to
views of ancient temples and atmospheric landscapes. The gestural nature
that defines much of Twombly’s better know works seems absent here as the
artist works through small series of two or three shots of the same subject
that focus attention on composition. Later in our trip while visiting the
Musée d'Orsay and found several of Claude Monet’s versions of the façade of the
Rouen Cathedral side by side I began to realize how much of Twombly’s seeming
compositional abandon in his paintings was indeed informed by the years of
framing and composing of the photographic works.