Rinus Van de Velde: Chapter II Window | GEORGE, I YELLED…
Rinus Van de Velde (b.1983) explores circular narratives in virtual, actual and parallel universes by encompassing paintings, installations, sculptures and videos. He has held solo exhibitions at numerous prestigious museum including BOZAR in Brussels (2022), Kunstmuseum Luzern (2021), Frac des Pays de la Loire in Nantes (2021), and CAC Malage (2020), His work is represented in the collections of S.M.A.K. in Belgium, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp in Belgium, Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Belgium, Kunstmuseum Den Haag and Museum Voorlinden in Netherlands and CAC Malaga in Spain. In 2003, his solo exhibition will be held at Museum Voorlinden.
His Practice is an outcome of his persistent investigation of those concepts, and narratives constructed by adaptations of them including collected photographs he took by himself, inspiring images in the media, literature and conversation with historical figures in his subjective imagination. Van de Velde, who starts from the assumption that the gap between reality and fiction in not too far, and shares loose boundaries, explores the various possibilities brought by the flexibility of the boundaries. The fictional story, a mixture of real events and imagination collected by the arts, crosses between the realm of fiction and non-fiction, becoming the basis of his unique storytelling. In particular, the work in which a character with a similar appearance to the artist attracts the concepts of doppelganger and parallel universe to his artistic practice and finds the expandability of paintings.
Van de Velde's work features a structure of a combination of upper images and lower texts that seems to borrow classical media layouts such as newspaper. By borrowing this traditional layout, he encourages audience to reconsider reality of the situations which the artist describes in his paintings and to continuously infer an allegory between the image and the text. The sentence from Van de Velde operates as a monologue adding a calm, contemplative mood in the image. In recent works, most of the sentences, written in the first person perspective combined with images, give an illusion that seems to be the autobiographical narrative of the artist.
