Pieter Vermeersch

Galerie Thomas Schulte presents a solo exhibition by Pieter Vermeersch, featuring new works and immersive interventions, which, through color and spatial relationships, respond intuitively to the surroundings of the Corner Space and adjacent Window Space. The complementary, coexisting aspects of representation and abstraction are probed through their different interactions within and between works of varying dimensional and material properties – comprising painting, silkscreen and found objects. In taking an analytical approach to the behaviors and conditions of the painted image, color and light, the parameters of the medium are expanded to accommodate further reflection – becoming as elemental as matter, space and time.

Color gradually surfaces from the white of the gallery’s high walls in the Corner Space. The paintings’ support, the wall, is foregrounded, while seemingly unanchored through the sheer lightness of their coming into being. Two gradients, one red and one yellow, extend vertically and meet at the corner of two adjacent walls – each color intensifying and fading away through movements that take opposing directions. Color, here, in its emergence and shifts, is a measure of time. Though it might somehow be sensed in the gentle shifts and slow transitions, the time taken to realize the paintings cannot be fully grasped through their fluidity. No trace of their stratifications is left, only a smooth continuity of presence – an unmediated motion, even in stillness, as seemingly effortless as paint darkening as it dries. It is an atmospheric and phenomenological progression of time through subtle changes in light, as diffuse and immaterial as a sky at sunrise or sunset – as the colors here in relation to the large windows might allude to. Rather than a specific image, the illusion represented is of a temporal-spatial nature, one that could be experienced as infinite. The abstraction of color in a gradient, with all its volume and nuance, reaches to the depths of its unknown: as the dawning of representation.

In the up and down motion of the gradients, the parallel yet opposite progressions seem to mirror one another – a kind of duality, in which both coming and going occur at the same time. There is a similar doubling within the yellow gradient, which is partially divided through the presence of another rectangular frame, another space: the doorway, as a threshold between reality and illusion. As the viewer passes or peers through it, a new moment – the here and now – is layered with the time scale of the image’s exposure.

Vermeersch’s approach to painting has a photographic basis; he takes photography as an ontology. Like a Polaroid, or a photo being developed in the dark room, the state of an image progressively though almost instantaneously appearing is experienced as time. In the window space, a large painting on canvas takes a photographic source that is without recognizable spatial reference. But rather than purely abstract, such paintings are meticulous reproductions, hyperrealistic abstractions, as the artist refers to them. It is a depiction of reality through a particular measure of time and conditions of light, the conditions of visibility or of what could become visible. The painting is composed of ethereal, almost iridescent white tones, shifting as though at the edge of an image that might still arrive – like a printer, it comes to being through mechanical motions back and forth, from top to bottom.

Set in relation to this is a grey concrete fragment taken from a local demolition site, contrasting the image’s abstraction and immateriality with concrete matter, as another kind of representation of space and time. It is a physically grounding element, but it has been taken out of its representational context. While building materials might similarly refer to a space coming into being, as in the image, this fragment comes directly out of a process of being broken down – a mirroring, perhaps, of this duality in the paintings.

Situated in between these two elements is another wall-based work: a small black marble fragment with a silkscreened image of itself imposed over the part of it that is reproduced. Matter and its representation, the image and its support, the natural and the fabricated, are merged. In its life lines, marble reveals its own scale of time – a geological dimension through which time is made solid. But the closer you get to the marble slab here, the more it begins to dematerialize. Through the silkscreening technique, the breakdown of the image, and by extension the stone, becomes tangible, as the CMYK grid and dots, the gaps in between, are clearly visible.

In contrast to the corner space, the works in the window space bear no prominent color, but another kind of gradient forms among the three elements: from white, to grey, to black. Light and its absence hold the potential to generate an image, to create an illusion of depth. Through such dualities, as well as doublings and repetitions, time is broken down into minute, transportable fragments. By capturing ephemerality, it is made immersive once again – in the precise depiction of reality as illusory, as a parallel space in continual development. 

Text by Julianne Cordray