FrontSpace - 20/01 - 17/02/2019 :

SYMBOLS OF DEMOCRACY:  Pieter jan Martyn - art project as investigation into Bende Van Nijvel

Peter Puype ° 1974 Torhout (B)

Peter Puype responds to social events, interpersonal relationships, the lack of understanding and empathy, the sense of territory, the corruption, the deception ... In short: what goes wrong in society. Parody is not strange to him here. Sometimes his work succeeds in sowing doubt and often the substantive reactions to his work vary widely. Partly because of his deep-rooted commitment and keen insight he does not work for the display case. Aesthetics about the aesthetics does not interest him.

The strongly quoted message prevails, the words, sentences and images last, although color and form often play a decisive role. Sometimes he also expresses himself through videos and performances and whoever watches attentively finds humor in his work. Already several times he picked out with controversial, haunting installations. "Iconoclasm" (Stadshallen Bruges), "The Church of Capitalism" (solo exhibition "De Bond" / Bruges), is a chapel built from cardboard. In Puype's remarkable artistic ouevre we often notice that today we mainly adore brand names, swallow what we are chewed and that we are constantly being brainstormed by advertising images.

Johan Debruyne

Dani Ploeger - ° Middelburg (NL) combines performance, video, computer programming and electronics hacking to investigate and undermine the glasses of techno-consumer culture. In his work, he regularly misuses, reuses and destroys everyday devices. His work reveals seemingly banal and self-evident aspects of digital culture, as objects of both physical beauty and political power.

Among other things, he worked with traditional metal workers in the old city of Cairo to wrap tablet computers in sheet steel, followed firearm training in Poland to shoot an iPad with an AK47, made a VR installation while being surrounded by frontline troops in the Donbass war. He traveled to landfills in Nigeria to collect electronic waste from Europe ...

Peter Puype, permanently represented by BruthausGallery, chose to collaborate with Dani Ploeger in this project. Both have known each other for a long time, both of whom speak a circumscribed artistic language, sometimes provocative, sometimes humorous, but absolutely topical. For this presentation they joined together for a long time as a necessary incubation period.

Pieter jan Martyn 1986, Kortrijk (B) is fascinated by the dubious visual language of shared history and journalism. He is extremely fascinated by the visual language and compositions in recording the contours of a potential historical document. There is something magical about the tactility of the weathered chosen past. There is something mysterious hidden under the texture of preserved history. But Martyn was also bitten by the search for which selection of images, compositions and choices were not made in the visual reporting of a past. The themes in the oeuvre of Pieter-Jan Martyn, for example the Nuremberg process, the terrorist group RAF, the fire in the Innovation, the Surgery series or the Audience series, are inspired by a thorough, almost journalistic, historical image research of what has not been shown. Martyn is concerned with the formal translation of a "pseudo" accurate reconstruction of a specific moment. The emphasis here is on imagining the image gaps and image distortions as a trace-less referentiality of an event. On the basis of photographic material, a compelling aesthetic added value is given to the painted reconstruction of the images from the past. Pieter Jan Martyn decided for this project to focus on 'De Bende van Nijvel', a painful, unresolved and black history of Belgium. For this occasion he collaborated with journalist Jonas Bruyneel who, through a novella under the title 'Symbols of Democracy', formed this project into one whole. The novella will also be released at this opening.