guided tours by Piet de Jonge and Sabine van Sprang

Guide Piet de Jonge on Locus Solus and Little Sparta

Guide Piet de Jonge on Charly van Rest

The Locus Solus Domesticus exhibition has been open for 12 weeks now. We have had 17 guides who did a personal tour through the exhibition, like Martial Canterel in the novel Locus Solus. Last Saturday, December 15, Piet de Jonge and Sabine van Sprang were our excellent guides. During the tour, Piet de Jonge tried not to mention the names of the artists, which is quite difficult as the name of the artist is a label and the work of art can’t exist without its creator’s name. But Piet succeeded quite a while in allowing the art works exist in anonymity. The works change, the veil of the name is gone, a layer less to peel of. The erased black and white drawings on magazine images reminded Piet de Jonge of the surrealist magazine Minotaure. Photography can focus on objects that don’t seem to be real, but exist in another world that is surreal. The erasing on magazine images have the same atmosphere of strange, prehistoric stones or fossils like they were often reproduced in Minotaure. The three cobblestones are very precisely reproduced, just like Marcel D. had done when he made the facsimiles of his entire oeuvre in “boite en valise”. It is not really the work of an artist, but rather the work of a very precise handcrafts man. Comparable to the three painted marbles at the beginning of the exhibition.

Sabine van Sprang, specialist in 16^th and 17^th century Northern European painting, set out with a clear viewpoint. At first glance she perceived the exhibition as a “cabinet d’amateur” or “Wunderkammer”. In Renaissance Europe such a “cabinet of curiosities” was an encyclopaedic collection of types of objects whose categorical boundaries still had to be defined and could belong to natural history, geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art and antiques. It is a representation of the world and the universe that fits into an exhibition space. Sabine started with the anamorphosis photo of Bernard Voïta, the painted marbles of Jan Swartenbroekx and the painted circles composition of Johan van Oord. Three works which represent the entire exhibition. Anamorphosis, perspective, illusion, perception are keywords, art and nature playing, meeting, wondering. In the Locus Solus Domesticus “Wunderkammer” the earth is flat, like the discs of Christoph Fink. The black disc, representing all the facts and events in the artist’s life that haven’t been written down, was the most perfect work in the exhibition, the best to end the guided tour with. But you can’t end with perfectionism, so Sabine asked the visitors to descend the stairs and go to the basement to see the most immaterial work in the exhibition: Joëlle Tuerlinckx’ simple geometric Volume lighted by three spots.

Guide Sabine van Sprang in conversation with Willem Oorebeek

Guide Sabine van Sprang on a diptych of Mitja Tusek