Chris Meulemans & Johan Gelper
Écriture botanique
valerie_traan gallery
It is no coincidence that paintings by Chris Meulemans and sculptures by Johan Gelper are exhibited together. Although they practice different disciplines, there are remarkable similarities in their respective oeuvres and artistic practice.
Working method
Similarities first manifest themselves in their respective working methods. Typical for both artists is that they never start with a predetermined idea or image in mind, let alone a message. Much more decisive are the materials they have at hand and the actions that ensue.
To the occasional visitor, Johan Gelper's studio may look somewhat chaotic at first glance. The collection of materials he works with has grown organically over time. On the one hand, these are materials he purchases and, on the other, things he finds here and there. For instance, when he participated in a group exhibition in a former tax office building in 2022, he found pink slats there. It gave rise to a series of works in which shapes and figures resulted directly from the specific properties of this material. Returning to the studio, a closer look reveals that every part of the space fulfils a function in organizing materials or new and older works, as well as in selecting and searching for creative directions and new images.
Chris Meulemans also lets forms arise very intuitively from the properties of the paint, the touch, the paint stroke. She is guided by her hand and by the materials at hand. Some actions seem to stand on their own, some look like the direct result of a reflex, while others are placed somewhat more thoughtfully next to or behind or over one another, until they form a long line, a grid or an elementary pattern. Sometimes a more or less recognizable figurative motif appears.
In both Gelper and Meulemans, we see an artist who acts and lets things happen, alert to what presents itself, to what appears in this experimental game.
Provisionality
When Meulemans sees the impetus for a form looming, it is possible that she will connect and mark it, but equally, she lets various possible readings coexist. She often plays a game where positive and negative or figure and background can switch roles in the blink of an eye, allowing another possible image to appear. This game is never finished. This inherent provisionalness applies to the artist, who often gives a work a little time, sets it aside for a while, to decide afterwards whether or not it is 'finished'. It also applies to each individual viewer, for whom the work, with each 'reading', is, time and again, an invitation to complete the final image.
We find the same sense of precociousness with Johan Gelper, who rarely welds or glues various parts of a sculpture together. Much more often, for instance, he will use eyes and screws or strips to connect various parts, so that they can be detached fairly easily afterwards. It effectively happens regularly that he disassembles a sculpture and uses some parts to make a new assembly. This is in sharp contrast to the eternity value often associated with classical sculpture, with forms chiselled in stone or cast in bronze.
In his 'organic', associative way of giving birth to a sculpture, Gelper does often draw inspiration from illustrious examples of modernist masters, such as Brancusi or Calder. That influence of modernism, e.g. in the figure of Matisse, is also evident in Chris Meulemans' work.
Drawing in space
Johan Gelper has always been influenced more by painting than by classical sculpture. And more so, from childhood, by drawings: by their delightful directness and lightness. Later also by technical drawings. Many of his sculptures look like drawings in space. It gives those sculptures a transparency he finds in constructivists like Rodchenko. They, like Gelper, considered the surrounding space an integral part of the work. Moreover, artists in the young Soviet Union in particular wanted to break the myth of the individual genius, by making the way a work of art was constructed completely comprehensible to the viewer.
Both artists also make drawings. In both cases, those drawings always possess their own autonomy: they are never design drawings, in function of a painting or a sculpture. Indeed, the latter would clash with the very first proposition: that neither artist ever starts from a predetermined plan or idea.
Just as Gelper's assemblage underpins most sculptures, the collage is crucial in Chris Meulemans' drawings. And even though most of Meulemans' paintings consist purely of paint on canvas, and thus do not contain literal collage components, her collages have an unmistakably strong impact on how the paintings, too, are spatially constructed. This is a kind of spatiality that is much closer to our everyday experience and perception than the imagestructured by mathematical perspective: much more heterogeneous, fragmentary, physical.
In both Chris Meulemans' collages and Johan Gelper's assemblages, a tension between construction and image thus emerges. That is: on the one hand, the work of art makes the viewer partake of its construction, which is never hidden in its concrete presence; on the other hand - and at the same time - this construction is also aimed at making an image appear in the viewer's gaze.
Ecriture botanique
A manifest similarity between the two oeuvres: there is an undeniable fascination with the plant kingdom.
A recognizable motif that appears very often in Meulemans' work of recent years is flowers or plants, sometimes depicted in a pot. This motif, in its obvious ordinariness, is strongly linked to the history of Western modernity, of globalization; industrialization and colonization. In addition, it is undoubtedly fascinating to note how often, worldwide, images of flowers or plants appear in the decoration of both homes and people. Overall, that recurring motif seems to allow Meulemans to probe and express how we 'stand in the world'.
From childhood, Johan Gelper was fascinated by what went on in the garden. For a long time he wanted to become a biologist. The wonder with which he immersed himself in natural phenomena as a child plays a central role in how he creates art today. This is reflected not only in the biomorphic figures that often appear in his sculptures, but also in his 'organic' way of working. Gelper often reads texts on biology and notices how many similarities there are with the laws of sculpture, for instance when it comes to growth processes: downwards, towards or into the ground, with gravity, or against it, up towards the light.
Ecriture botanique
'Ecriture botanique' is a pun on the term 'écriture automatique', an instinctive, spontaneous, (approximately) unconscious way of writing that was often used during surrealism, among others. 'Ecriture botanique' evokes an interaction between culture and nature, directing and letting happen, writing and letting nature speak.
Frank Maes, 2024