Teksten
Peter Van Impe positions the spectator into a dreamworld.
A sacrifice shaped as a vessel of wood, cloth and wax.
An embodied idea in a kayak of wood and paraffine in with a poem inside.
The gate of all and nothing in bronze.
The shadow of the shadow made of plaster and tar.
The body is a vessel on it’s way, following the stream, as a leaf in the wind, circle of thoughts.
Wrinkling in water, the sole’s ear like a seashell in bronze.
He is inspired by the dreams and visions.
The improvisation by the shaman-ritual of Inuit, Mongolian, Balkannations and Tibeth
give base to a language of shapes and sentiments that occure in his oeuvre.
Ad Breeveld in Schoon Schip
He assembles
Organises comfigurations with raw material.
Affected , broken, cut, bent…
Fragments that, tied up, knotted
Rise again to a new balance, a new structure
He glides, through a space,
Tensed by the fragile, vulnerable constructions,
A little forgotten, so peacefull.
Extreme silence becomes tactile and drawn into thin air
That surrounds and penetrates it.
Poetry of a subtile economy expressed through tender unrefined
Evocation without objective
The coming and going of thr ritual spirit on the silenced cry by the material put into sign
He assembles
Structures and dreams.
Raymond M. Balau
The languid world of the dream. The body is a vessel under way: Peter’s biotope. Transforming dreams into shape never is a flight, it is rather an urge, a deliberate poetical styling of shapes in dialogue with itself
As a spectator you are never pulled out of the centre; you are actually placed into your own focus. Whether Peter Works with sustainable bronze or perishable paper, reed or wax, there is always the sense of floating in the flow. His work shows no frills, just itself. When observing closely, you discover the tale told by the organic or inorganic shapes. No startling facts, no reactionary visions on environment or world politics. Just a personal story, averse of trend, averse of shape for shape’s sake. He derives shapes from other, smaller stories: a leaf in a breeze, a current of thoughts, the ear of the soul, a shadow.; elements of a larger entity. These borrowed elements don’t seem to protest; they stand or they lie, created and moulded by cursory fingers just to be part again of the same entity.
It might perhaps have been easier if I had written: Peter Van Impe’s work just is Peter Van Impe.
Kristina Delmeire
NO PERMANENT LANDSCAPE
Yves Beaumont, Kristina Delmeire, Lee Ranaldo, Leah Singer, Peter Van Impe
Curator: Jan Van Woensel
A collection of related thoughts: Iceland; Scandinavia; travel; on the road; from here to infinity; disappearance; journals; spoken words; weightlessness; gravity; light; burning totems; floating objects; loops and knots; layers; waves; soundscapes; transparency; shifting meanings; reflections … endless sleep.
The artists in“No Permanent Landscape”, an artist from Ostend, Belgian’s seaside, a duo from Antwerp, Belgium, and a duo from New York, United States, share a deep-rooted interest in travel.It was in 1997 when artists Peter Van Impe and Kristina Delmeire told me how “in the summer [they] travel to Iceland, rent a big jeep and drive into the volcanic hills and to the inland’s, stretched out, barren plains to disappear in the clouds”. It was a few years later when I first saw Lee Ranaldo’s self-made, handheld camera, music video for his introvert and dreamy song “Hoarfrost”. The film features Leah Singer visiting her family in the cold, snow-covered, suburban Winnipeg, Canada. The movie is a road trip, filmed mainly from the passenger’s seat and sometimes taking subtly edited detours to blurred images of personal imagination and memories. The journey is both physical and introspective. More recently, I saw Yves Beaumont’s one man show at galerie Jan Dhaese. Walking through his exhibition it felt as if I was walking in the night, only now and then recognizing a contour of something against a backdrop of a weak light in the far distance: both mysterious and breathtaking.
The artists in“No Permanent Landscape” work in different media: printmaking, drawing, painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture and installation. For this occasion, a modest selection of etches, lithography’s, silkscreens and sculpture form the fragmented, visual landscape of the art show. The contradiction between the quality of permanency of the art image, as well as the artwork’s reproducibility, and the fluid and transitory conceptual undertone of the exhibition’s theme is deliberate. The artworks appear both as scaled simulations of vast and deserted landscapes and mindscapes, and as windows that look out to such imagined sceneries. Yves Beaumont’s secret landscapes linger between dusk and dawn as in a permanent state of night; the most quiet time of life.. The mysterious, misty, almost ghost-like images of Kristina Delmeire remind us of both the beauty and the uncanniness of nature. Lee Ranaldo’s works, made on the road, recall the endlessness of the journey, during which feelings like boredom, homesickness and melancholy could occupy his mind. Peter Van Impe’s boat-like models remind us of the departure, great solitude and disappearance: the sensation of setting out to sea, floating alone, on an immense mass of water, like artist Bas Jan Ader once fatally did. Leah Singer’s transparent, multi-layered images of mountains and grasslands, strings and loops, portraits and stars enable a complexity of perspectives to the viewer; there is no one possible view; there is no exclusive route; there is no permanent landscape.
Jan Van Woensel, Fire Island, NY (2010)
Part of “Turnhout Cultural Capital of Flanders 2012”