CCNOA

30/30 – Image Archive Project

2010-06-27T18:30:00Z

with:

DELPHINE DEGUISLAGE (BE)
CLEMENS HOLLERER (A)
ANDREW HUSTON (USA)
ATSUO HUKUDA (JP)
CAMILA OLIVEIRA FAIRCLOUGH (BR/UK)
INGRID MARIA SINIBALDI (FR)
EMMANUEL VAN DER MEULEN (FR)
JAN MAARTEN VOSKUIL (NL)
LARS WOLTER (D)

CONCEPT: TILMAN
ORGANISATION: CCNOA, Brussels (BE)

Due to the fact that our art organization CCNOA was forced to close its doors in Brussels at the end of last year, we have decided to focus – at least for now – on the circulation of our touring group exhibitions while developing new concepts and ways to communicate our aims and goals and continue our activities as an international, multidisciplinary platform for contemporary ‘reductive' art.

Minusspace in cooperation with CCNOA is proud to present to the public our most recent project, the first edition of 30/30 – IMAGE ARCHIVE PROJECT (IAP).

30/30-IAP's basic idea is to slowly establish a collective collection, which will introduce the mesmerizing range of artistic approaches pursued in a pictorial dialogue and create an ever-increasing overview of contemporary artistic production in the realm of ‘reductive' art on an international level. 30/30-IAP will be administered by CCNOA in a joint effort with a selection of those artists CCNOA has cooperated with over the last 12 years as well as with newly invited artists from around the globe.

The project's title simply refers to the artwork's exact size, which is set at 30 x 30 cm with a maximum depth of 5 cm. Choosing this size will also enable us to travel this project cost effectively and it will allow us to store it easily (Museum in a suitcase).

Since this collective collection is an international open call to artists interested in participating, the continuous growth of 30/30-IAP will allow us to create exhibitions in varying configurations and size.

CCNOA is currently scheduling forthcoming presentations of 30/30-IAP in smaller artist-run spaces in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zeeland and the USA.

With your Eyes Only @ Yum, Brussels

2010-05-21T15:57:00Z

Artists Greet Billet (BE), Kjell Bjørgeengen (NO), Delphine Deguislage (BE), Alexandra Dementieva (RU/BE), Ward Denys (BE), Clemens Hollerer (AT), Simon Ingram (NZ), Aernoudt Jacobs (BE), Esther Stocker (IT/AT), Tilman (DE/BE), Pieter Vermeersch (BE), Dan Walsh (US), Carrie Yamaoka (US)

Concept Tilman

Duration 28/05/2010 - 09/07/2010 Opening Hours Wednesday - Sunday, 12.00 - 19.00 Location YUM, Avenue Van Volxemlaan 295, B-1190 Brussels

CCNOA is pleased to announce the second edition of its ninth touring group exhibition WITH YOUR EYES ONLY, which is scheduled to open at YUM, Brussels (directly across from the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre) on 27 May 2010 and will remain on view through 9 July 2010.

The first edition of WITH YOUR EYES ONLY was organized by CCNOA at the Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz (www.medienturm.at) where it premiered successfully on 11 December.

Given the size of the Brussels venue (1200 m2) and its unusual architecture, the second edition of WITH YOUR EYES ONLY will not only be the most daring project we have realized to date but will also present completely new site-specific works by all the participating artists on a scale commensurate with the location.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a 48-page full-color catalogue encompassing both editions of WITH YOUR EYES ONLY (publication date: July 2010).

We would like to extend our very special gratitude to Galila. Without her generosity, this exhibition would not have been possible.

WITH YOUR EYES ONLY can be seen as the culmination of CCNOA's international pioneering activities over the past decade, which have aimed above all to open and sensitize eyes, ears and minds, to enhance the understanding of art as an integral and enriching part of our existence and as a social commitment, and to contribute to the reinstatement of the continuity between aesthetic experience and the processes of daily life.

Addressing and challenging our primary sensual and sensory faculties and sensibilities WITH YOUR EYES ONLY offers a real-time and real-place experience providing us with an opportunity to consciously and actively participate in exploring and expanding our perceptual awareness of the here and now. It invites us to drop the ubiquitous need for identification, categorization and explanation, and to embrace the artwork's openness to multiple interpretations. It demands our mental, intellectual and physical collaboration in defining and redefining our intellectual and physical standpoints, in literally sensing 'awry'.

In return it offers us complete freedom to see for ourselves, to educate and develop our senses, and, in the process, to discover a fresh perspective on reality. After all: “Seeing is a creative act. He who only looks does not see. Seeing means reflecting, perceiving and being aware. He who only looks does not know. Seeing involves binding in all the senses … creating sense. ” (Gottfried Honegger, 2006) The scene will be set by a large spatial intervention / architectural structure - created by Belgian artist Ward Denys and German artist and curator Tilman - which will function as a platform, a maze, a metaphorical setting for experiential interaction within the givens of pictorial language. Eleven artists from Belgium and abroad will then join them in Brussels for a one-week stay to investigate the project's central topic in relation to the given site and the basic sensory information inherent in their respective artistic practices. In the course of the week, they will communally develop and interactively create site-specific works in response to this structure as well as to one another - generating a sensor-round 'arena / environment for perception'.

Tilman, who created the concept for this project, comments: “The concept for WITH YOUR EYES ONLY is basically driven by personal curiosity. It is also a journey revisited; a journey that I can only describe as one of wonderment at artistic development, the discovery of one's personal world and the world of cognitive perception.

“We are, consciously and subconsciously, exposed to intangible associations and simultaneous occurrences, to multifarious phenomena and to perceptual space. What catches our retinal perception? How do we read or decipher the information given by a complex work of art? Do we perceive the artwork as a whole or are we seduced by one of its constituent parts? How do we qualify different characteristics of one and the same thing and yet arrive at differing results and emotions?

“Just as an object can trigger multiple perceptions so it may equally well fail to trigger any perception at all. If there is no grounding in personal experience, there may literally be no perception. When objects are viewed without understanding, the mind will try to reach for something that it already recognizes in order to process what it is viewing. For the viewer exposed to an artwork and for the artist creating it, the final object is the result of an interplay between past experiences, knowledge and interpretation.

“Perception per se, the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information, is I believe crucial, especially in reductive work. Although some artists involved in the language of 'concrete' art might argue against it, the abstracted level of commentary in their own work also focuses on intricacies concerning themselves and their own world of thought. With this in mind and taking it as a point of departure for the exhibition project, I opted to invite a selection of artists whose works address and investigate different aspects of the issue to co-operate with me and create a multilayered perceptual experience rather then present their own point of view.”

SUPPORT

VLAAMSE OVERHEID BELGIUM, VLAAMSE GEMEENSCHAPSCOMMISSIE BRUSSEL, GILLIS PRINTING BRUSSELS, LEVIS BELGIUM, SCA PACKAGING, BELGIUM, SINT LUKAS BRUSSELS, VIDISQUARE BELGIUM, YUM, KULTUR STEIERMARK AUSTRIA, ÖSTERREICHISCHES KULTURFORUM BRUSSELS, OCA OFFICE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART NORWAY, UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

GREET BILLET

* 1973 IN LEUVEN (BE) / LIVES AND WORKS IN BRUSSELS (BE) / WWW.GREETBILLET.BE

In her research project The development of the monochrome in its digital and analogue/graphical form of apparition Greet Billet intends to create a link between the digital and the graphical/analogue. This link could originate by transferring the purest abstraction of the 256 digital color values of one single color (grey, green, red and blue) from a digital carrier to an analogue one and vice versa. Next to this she also asks herself if it would be possible to conceive a box or book containing all the parts of the analogue/graphical monochrome or a film containing all he parts of the digital monochrome. At the core of this thought process we always find the tension between the analogue and the digital monochrome; in fact the tension between objective quantizing and subjective valuing. This way Billet attempts, in her recent work, to explore the possibilities of communication in the field of meaning transference. For an individual an object or an event can have an unequivocal meaning, or at least be unambiguous at a specific moment in time. However, the communication about this object or this event each time shows the impossibility to share this unequivocal meaning. Those involved in the communication create their own interpretations of the object or the event. This way communications manifests itself as the fundamental impossibility to share or communicate meanings. Thus, in 2007 she printed words on mirrors, causing their seemingly unequivocal meaning to be reflected towards the viewer, who was confronted with the purely subjective meaning of what seems to happen objectively when we see a word. Simultaneously the viewer saw his own subjectivity in another space, his mirror image, confronting him with the impossibility to objectify his self. The impossibility to give meaning to our world and us and to communicate this meaning seems to be resolved when using objective quantifiable values going beyond the subjective interpreted evaluation. This research is one about the tension between the digital (objective, numerical) values of colors and their analogue (subjective, equivocal) evaluation. That which manifests itself here is another impossibility: reality cannot be captured into objectively delimited categories or numerical variables. There are no colors as such in the physical reality. All there is a continuum of frequencies of light reflection and absorption. In reality we can clearly separate one object from another, but we cannot do that with color. A color such as “red” is not a mere subjective evaluation of a specific, though not strictly fathomable spectral range. It is once again an evaluation that cannot be communicated. What I see as “red” could very well be “green” to someone else. By convention we agree to name this frequency “red”, but its subjective appreciation can fundamentally differ. People who are colorblind can live their lives without ever realizing that they are colorblind. They say “red” when it is red, but what exactly do they see? The only objective experience seems to be the most subjective.

KJELL BJØRGEENGEN

* 1951 IN OSLO (NO) / LIVES AND WORKS IN OSLO / WWW.KJELLBJORGENGEN.COM

Most of Kjell Bjorgeengen's works deal with a combination of representation, the artists' subject, and the letting go of subjective control by automated processing from sound. Video is structured through what could be called 'post-Cageian' methods of productions; to retain the artist's subject of expression and at the same time undermine this subjectivity through the structuring of images from automated processes of sound and music mediated through technology. This technology is in itself often modified in co-operation with hardware and software designers. The installations and video works are based on non-representational references. The pursuit is not to accept the given, be it perceptual prejudices imbedded in language or the dominant economic/political structure. "Kjell Bjorgeengen's idealistic pursuit of purity and blankness through an amalgamation of sound waves, moving images and lights is like receiving transmissions from the other side. Grainy, ghostly images constantly vibrate and peel off, to reveal hidden forms that build up then disintegrate. Like thousands of abstract and calligraphic messages they are undecipherable. Stimulation of senses arouses inner reaction, as visual and acoustic syntheses attempt to reach the unattainable level of nothingness. Bjorgeengen's colliding visions and sounds are metaphoric of shifting voids in parallel worlds." ('Paradise Regained' by Apinan Poshyananda).

DELPHINE DEGUISLAGE

* 1980 IN NAMUR (BE) / LIVES AND WORKS IN ANTWERP (BE) / WWW.DELPHINEDEGUISLAGE.COM

From Wiels to the Galerie melanieRio the young Belgian artist Delphine Deguislage renders colour weightless and defies the laws of space, creating a precise and playful mise-en-abime oscillating between the surreal world of Alice in Wonderland and the psycho-analytical sets of David Lynch. Delphine is constantly experimenting, looking into where our field of vision starts and where it stops. Her toned personality evokes a well-placed comma, punctuation just where it should be, exact. Her works revolve around volume in space or space around matter. Each medium used incorporates a given movement, line or colour, always just right. In ”IT'S UP TO YOU” three-dimensional sculptures, installations, silkscreen prints and drawings ask one and the same question: what do we see? And it is here that the spectator comes on stage, a genuine partner in the visual play. Delphine differentiates between the term 'user' and the term 'spectator'. For her the observer becomes active and the work only exists if he or she makes use of it. This kinetic work immediately calls to mind François Morellet, the forerunner of minimalist art, with his uninterrupted research into space and geometry. The work of Delphine Deguislage belongs to a post-modernist tradition that is not confined to a single medium. The pieces she creates are all part of a questioning visual process around colour, taking us on a journey of exploration, an exploration of the third dimension. (Corinne Bardoux, October 2009)

ALEXANDRA DEMENTIEVA

* 1960 IN MOSCOW (RU) / LIVES AND WORKS IN BRUSSELS (BE) / WWW.ALEXDEMENTIEVA.ORG

Alexandra Dementieva studied journalism and fine arts in Moscow and Brussels. Her main interests focus on social psychology and perception and their application in multimedia interactive installations. Her videowork integrates different elements including behavioral psychology, developing narrative using a 'subjective camera'. Her interactive installation projects attempt to widen the mind's potential for perception using different production materials: computers, video projections, soundtracks, slides, photography, etc. By making certain historical, cultural and political allusions, her exhibition locations create the frame within which the idea develops. The projects explore the spectator's depths of perceptual experience and the interaction of the individual spectator with the exhibition as well as with other visitors. The subject of an installation or its production method becomes less important to her than the mind of the user. Thus the latter becomes the center of the project or the main actor in the performance.

WARD DENYS

* 1975 IN IZEGEM (BE) / LIVES AND WORKS IN GENT (BE) / WWW.WARDDENYS.BE

Through the cross-sectioning of visual arts and architecture, Ward Denys transcends the boundaries of the functional and the dysfunctional, of the inside and outside, of surface and depth. His installations, posited in a minimalist rigor, respond to architectural givens, in compliance and vis-à-vis; they create as much rhythm as counter- rhythm, producing physical disorientation through their mirroring effects. Denys' works then, built out of plywood and cardboard, manifest themselves as unsettling fragments of architecture, simultaneously taking the status of propositions towards further execution and integration, and remnants, parts of the construction process that were never fully realized. The art of Ward Denys adheres explicitly to this position in the past and in the future - making his work an issue to be dealt with in the present. In recent years, the artist has explored this logic through the singularity of each of his installation works. Emblematic of the artist's recent preoccupations, the installation works signal a turn from his earlier more sculpture- and object-oriented work. But it seems little more than a formal break: as his early series of rescaled houses and generic landscapes hover between abstraction and functionalism, they have laid out the basic scheme for Denys' whole body of work. A body of work in which responses become residual and fragments are suitable to be built upon.

CLEMENS HOLLERER

* 1975 IN BRUCK-MUR (AT) / LIVES AND WORKS IN GRAZ (AT) / WWW.CLEMENSHOLLERER.COM

Mapping the space. Leaving a trace. These are the adventures of an identity in search for its proper place. Clemens Hollerer is interested in the folds of subjectivity, but also in the layers of representation. He follows ordinary forms, found geometries, denoting their life and functioning. He reacts to space, by either responding to it, supporting or questioning it, using his own language of shapes and colors. He takes away the idea of what he is looking at and sees it as a shape or as areas relating to each other. The results are site-specific wall paintings as well as installations and painted objects. His hyper-attention and constant search for aesthetic compositions build up a tension, which prompts his search for perfection in expression and provides his works with a rhythmic quality.

SIMON INGRAM

* 1971 IN WELLINGTON (NZ) / LIVES AND WORKS IN AUCKLAND (NZ) / WWW.HUMANITIESRESEARCH.NET

Mixed among the paint tubes and brushes in Simon Ingram's studio are plastic Lego blocks, metal rods and clamps, wires and yellow boxes with rudimentary controls. These are the "consumer grade" robotics kits Ingram uses to construct self-painting artworks. Both his machines and his works draw on computer science theories of artificial life. An example is Langton's Ant, a program written in the 1980s. The ant starts out on a grid containing black and white cells. If it is on a black square, it turns right 90 degrees and moves forward one unit. If the ant is on a white square, it turns left 90 degrees and moves forward one unit. When the ant leaves a square, it inverts the color. Ingram says by appropriating such rules, he turns himself into a sort of painting machine.

AERNOUDT JACOBS

* 1968 IN WILRIJK (BE) / LIVES AND WORKS IN BRUSSELS (BE) / WWW.TMRX.ORG

Arnaud Jacobs studied architecture. After his studies it did not take long, however, before he chose sound. Today he has released sound works under several aliases: MarkMancha, missfit, tmrx. From 2004, under the name Aernoudt Jacobs, he has focused on installations and performances. His work has been exhibited internationally and he has released two albums on critically acclaimed labels as Staalplaat (NL) and Selektion (D). Generally Jacobs sets out from a fascination for sound, in any form. This explains how he takes his raw material from reality: with a microphone and recorder as field recordings. His works are the result of a research of the different aspects of field recordings and how to assimilate this material to new forms, new contexts. For him the actual resulting field recordings are only a registration. The act, the memory, the context of the recording are even more interesting and complementary motives for his research. The output of his work hovers as some kind of an interaction between micro and macro, inside and outside, fieldwork and studio, reality and fictionalization. In his installation work he investigates mostly correlations between sound, matter, space/location, perception and psychoacoustics. Perception is an important aspect in his work. Perceiving music, sound, harmonies is an activity that is always linked to memories. This association is an ongoing preoccupation that is visible in most of his work. With the aid of psychoacoustic theories, he explores how perception can be influenced and how to express sound physically, spatially and emotionally.

ESTHER STOCKER

* 1975 IN SILANDRO (IT) / LIVES AND WORKS IN VIENNA (AT) / WWW.ESTHERSTOCKER.NET

The paintings, murals and installations of Esther Stocker, based on grid structures and on the colors black, white and gray, consistently manifest entanglements, interconnections, interpenetrations, both semantically and formally, for which the variably deployed grid motif functions as a metaphorical logo. Stocker consistently breaks with one-dimensional notions of order, space, and painting as contextual and relational factors and concepts. When an artist so persistently preoccupied with spatial structures and spatial experience, simultaneously calls attention to the fact that „we know nothing about space“ (Stocker), then her stance would seem to testify to a productive skepticism which arises from unremitting and methodical attempts at understanding, and from insight into their-in principle-interminability. (Excerpt from Systematically Broken Systems, Rainer Fuchs)

TILMAN

* 1959 IN MUNICH (DE) / LIVES AND WORKS IN BRUSSELS (BE) & NEW YORK (US) / WWW.LOOKAWRY.COM

At first sight we detect in Tilman's works a language shaped and haunted by the ghosts of minimalism and concrete art. But we are soon overwhelmed by a multitude of information giving us the opportunity to read the various components of this oeuvre from a personal angle. The works emanate from a careful approach to subjects other than art-inherent; they refuse to dominate the dialogue but rather try to open up and invite the viewer to take part in a visual and mental journey. The formal information we read seems to function as a method for luring us into the process of seeing and to form an overture for a bigger event. The superimposition of the language of form and color inherent in the preoccupation with reductive painting on to a strong connection to a real visual world leads us to a complex construct of opportunities to participate in an experiential process. Objects seen and found in the context of everyday life, functioning together with discarded objects disconnected from their intrinsic context of production and use, find their way into the artist's mind and language, mediating for higher claims but also highlighting the visual poetry within. Is it a mere projection of the creative mind or are those things talking for themselves, providing information about their existence? The memory of objects experienced in Tilman's work leads us to a possible dialogue broader than that of a formal discourse about painting, although exposing notions of it or at most partially appropriating the language to serve his personal universe. The work is concerned with the basic act of seeing and perception as a constructive approach towards reading one's surroundings, mentally and physically, digesting information from subjective and objective matters at the same time and place. We are entering a world of possibilities, angles, openings, spaces, sensualities and intimacies; traces of thoughts in memory and presence come to mind. We are invited to look, to search, to discover and satisfy our curiosity, given the fact of sharing our own presence with the presence of these objects, in their seductive and physical qualities.

PIETER VERMEERSCH

* 1973 IN KORTRIJK (BE) / LIVES AND WORKS IN BRUSSELS (BE) / WWW.PIETERVERMEERSCH.BE

There are images that become abstract and there are abstractions that become images. Pieter Vermeersch is not an abstract painter as such but rather an image maker; those mental images he finds in reality by photographic means. There is no such thing as pure abstraction. Everything is connected to some part of reality. The image of different degrees of luminosity or the image of the colour of the rainbow's prism for instance, they fascinate Pieter Vermeersch by their capacity to represent a recognisable image, both identifiable and abstract, while emphasizing the process of image apparition, this "meta-image" in which time progression and space definition take place. Painting "non-spaces", dead angles, forgotten spaces from our daily perception (whether it is the Paintings 1999 series, the monumental installation at the MuHKA in 2006, its sequel 10 Untitled paintings of 2007 or the work realized at the Palais des Beaux Arts during the Jeune Peinture 2007 contest exhibition in 2007); it is not about abstract images, autonomous as such, but a representation or a physical projection of an immaterial space related to painting. The Works in Progress I, II, III series, like a lot of Pieter Vermeersch' installations, give the impression of a purely abstract work. They are large monochrome surfaces painted on the glass of display windows or a pavilion, with a daily changing tonality and creating inside the space a colour emanation by changing ephemeral essence according to daylight. In the end the artist's attention was drawn to this tension between the objectivity of these monochrome, rectangular abstract forms seen from outside and this more subjective and fading interior "light and colour painting". Out of the Work in Progress I, II, III series various image-paintings were born that were derived from numerous photographs made by Pieter Vermeersch. The union of the abstract with reality gave birth to a child, sublime, androgynous born out of Apollonian and Dionysian reconciliation. But beware, Pieter Vermeersch is not aiming for the sublime, he revolves around it to better catch it. And we barely let ourselves be seduced and he bounces us back to our reality. All this is nothing but painting... (excerpt from 'Non Space The Image of absence', Lilou Vidal, July 2008 )

DAN WALSH

* 1960 IN PHILADELPHIA (US) / LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK (US)

Dan Walsh became known in the early 90s through a group of abstract paintings which followed a path different from that of the "appropriationist" work of the precedent generation. In essence, Dan Walsh considered painting a tool to bring back into play the mechanisms of perception, and not as a simple instrument of criticism. In the first of these works he proposed, through black and yellow lines executed in freehand, basic frames of perception. Over the years, these were succeeded by colored surfaces connected to each other by continual or broken lines. From then on the painting evolved into a potential exhibition space, with different possible pictures mises en abyme: it was left to the viewer to sort out a complex situation of perception, where a painting can be a wall, or a wall a painting. This crossover is most evident in the books that the artist produced starting in 1998. He is of course aware that, from the '60s on, printed work presented one of the possible forms an exhibition could take. For Dan Walsh, publication, usually of a small hand-crafted edition, provides a field for experimentation, a laboratory of ideas, where past and future paintings can converse, free from the constraints of chronology. (chch)

CARRIE YAMAOKA

* 1958 IN THE UNITED STATES / LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK (US)

For nearly a decade, Carrie Yamaoka has made reflective and optically disturbing paintings of mylar encapsulated in resin. The artist pours resin onto a reflective ground that is empty of content but full of incident. (…) Air bubbles, liquid sluices and other artifacts of production reveal a layered archaeology of process while forming loci for an otherwise shifting and fluid gaze. The mirrored surfaces of these works, which are usually made of resin on wood, range from nearly machine-made perfection to the random, bubbly roughness of fired glaze; from small to rather large; from silver to deep blue or green. Some hang on the wall like paintings; others are tucked in corners or on the floor. No two are alike. None are exactly as simple or as uniform as you first assume. Like Robert Ryman's work, Ms. Yamaoka's is a reverent dissection of the modernist monochrome, but she also partakes of a more parodistic approach, exemplified by Robert Rauschenberg's ''White Paintings'' from the early 1950's, in which the viewer's shadow becomes part of the work. Yet its seeming embrace of accident can be connected to the much older tradition of Japanese ceramics. However you parse them, her efforts intimate a rejuvenation of Minimalism, spurred by new materials, more refined techniques and fresh ideas. (Roberta Smith, Carrie Yamaoka: 'World Hotel,' New York Times June 25, 2004)

My eyes keep me in trouble

2010-04-30T15:56:00Z

MY EYES KEEP ME IN TROUBLE

MY EYES KEEP ME IN TROUBLE is the seventh touring group exhibition organized by CCNOA Brussels, Belgium since 2001. The exhibition premiered in April 2007 at Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem (www.nieuwevide.nl), and subsequently traveled during the Sydney Biennial 2008 to the Sydney College of the Arts Gallery, Sydney (www.usyd.edu.au; June 2008) and afterwards to The Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand (www.physicsroom.org.nz; August 2008). The exhibition is curated by the German artist & curator Tilman and features in general the work of +/- 30 international artists.

As gesture to the guest country and the exhibition venue MY EYES KEEP ME IN TROUBLE is revised for each venue and will include - along with international artists - a wider selection of national artists – in this case Argentinean artists. This not only provides an insight into the artists' different artistic approaches and practices and contextualizes their positions at an international level; it also strengthens cultural exchange between the cultural communities involved and enriches the supranational dialogue and discourse on contemporary abstract art.

MY EYES KEEP ME IN TROUBLE includes site-specific installation(s), wall paintings, paintings, objects, and videos. In view of the varying sizes of prospective venues, however, not all artists will be necessarily always included in all venues. The curator will revise the final selection of artists for each venue

MY EYES KEEP ME IN TROUBLE is the title of a song with lyrics and music by blues legend R.L. Burnside. The seemingly innocent yet conscious title of this blues song triggered the idea to form or formulate a dialogue between the different positions and concerns of a number of artists whose practice revolves around the idea of non-representational, reductive or concrete art as the essential approach towards art-making.

The thoughts of Josef Albers on the 'reductive' – 'to open the eyes' or 'the eye is thinking' – immediately came to mind. These ideas, deeply grounded in the history of non-representational art or more precisely of reductive art, and their ongoing influence on artists today, the crossovers with other art movements and even the resurgence of the idea of the 'concrete' are the givens for this exhibition project.

MY EYES KEEP ME IN TROUBLE can be seen as the bass line of the visual artist's very own song. The artist today may no longer be caught by the inner mysteries of life or the metaphysical subjects or theories and –isms, which developed in their wake as an almost logical response.

The artist today lives in a totally visual world and reacts to it, is drawn into it, without this undermining his/her intimate outlook on the world, and often creates a close relationship with the objects/subjects of daily life.

The resulting works of art would seem to convey the idea of being environmental property in which the distinction between the personal universe and mass culture starts to blur but the discrete and the intimate remain.

This exhibition can be perceived as a compilation, a gathering of information, thought, content and context relating to today's artistic practice in the realm of reductive art. The key underlying message may be no more than the message of possibility and a reinstatement of phenomenology, the act of self-seeing. It is the personal eye, which is fascinated by what it discovers. Anything which catches the artist's eye can be appropriated and used to create a personal language, filtered into the intimate language of art-making spurned by the received ideas and philosophical tenets surrounding the subject of the 'reductive'. At the same time the forgotten language of visual environmental sensation resurfaces and the value of individual properties is reinstated. With the application of different means and media the artist has a great variety of options for expressing his/her involvement with the personalized subjects that are now part of the aesthetic of art making. The end result is a personal journey in which everyone can participate.

This curatorial project is not just intended as yet another interpretation by yet another curator. No one artist is being promoted; no one artists' group is being presented. The artworks themselves are not to be seen as props underlining a curatorial idea or as commodities launching a new fashion. They speak for themselves as individual œuvres or as staging posts in the visual journey on offer, triggering and encouraging the actual act of seeing. There will be no explanation or theoretical discourse on the content of the exhibition. The viewer entering the space will be given the opportunity to 'see', to explore the different artworks, their poetry and language, their social space and specificity. (Team CCNOA 2007)

Composite Visions @ CAN centre d'art de Neuchâtel

2010-02-13T16:29:00Z

CURATORS: TILMAN & PETRA BUNGERT

OPENING HOURS: Wednesday - Sunday: 14.00 –18.00; Thursday: 14.00 – 20.00; The CAN is also open on holidays.

GUIDED TOURS: Thursday February 25th at 6 pm / Saturday March 13th at 4.30 pm

EXHIBITION SUPPORT: Flemish Authorities Belgium / Ministry of Culture, the Flemish Community Commission of the Brussels -Capital Region, OCA-Office for Contemporary Art Norway.

CAN ANNUAL SUPPORT: Ville et Canton de Neuchâtel, Loterie Romande, Fondation de Famille Sandoz, Pour-cent culturel Migros.

CAN MEDIA PARTNERS: ch-arts, daté, le Courrier.

After 2step, minimalpop, Painted Objects, Double Exposure, A Bit O' White, My Eyes Keep Me In Trouble, Yo, Mo' Modernism and With Your Eyes Only, COMPOSITE VISIONS is the ninth touring group exhibition organized by CCNOA Brussels, Belgium (www.ccnoa.org) and an exchange with the CAN who organized the last exhibition, entitled HYPERCONCRET in our previous space exhibition in Brussels.

Since its last theoretical stance as a sublime yet powerful art form, creating a new -ism and ironically also stating the end not only of painting but possibly also of visual art in general, and of its intellectual process, the idea of the ‘reductive' itself has made an impressive return. Traces of the idea of the ‘reductive' and similar approaches to art-making can be found in many artistic oeuvres which have come into the limelight since the overpowering postmodern related statements by artists and critics in the late 80's, and the aesthetics of the ‘reductive', nonobjective and concrete are now a subject of reflection in contemporary art practices, re-emerging from an imposed quasi non-existence.

In this state of relative non-recognition within the discourse and debate around art and culture in general, the subject of the ‘reductive' as a possible antithesis to the overpowering reintroduction of representational painting and at the same time to the emergence of the focus on new media, technology and photography, has regained considerable strength over the last decade within an international frame of cultural production and commerce, as well as through the firmly held lone positions of artists like Mosset, Charlton, Armleder, Morellet, Palermo and others throughout the 80's and 90's.

Having seemingly recovered from the harsh critical overtones after almost being eliminated from contemporary discourse, in which a retroactive and purely commercial tone took over, the ideas and strategies of the ‘reductive' and ‘essential' have slowly found their way back into artistic language and practice. Yet, due to the visual superimpositions of present times, artists have started to shy away from the rigid limitations of -isms related to the ‘non-objective' or ‘reductive' and have embedded existing ideas, confluence of styles and approaches into the contemporary world, the here and now, mingling with popular culture as well as branching out of the studio practice inherent in painting as we know it and as the majority still likes to understand it.

Crossovers with other forms of art, like pop art, installation, and new media, play a major role in this new understanding of art-making in the realm of the ‘reductive' and in its breaking out of its claimed territory with excursions into new planes of understanding, confronting the remarkable stakes which are on offer within the perimeter of ‘reductive' art production today.

COMPOSITE VISIONS is triggered by the multitude of influences entering the thinking, thought process and practices of an array of like-minded contemporary artists from around the globe working within the fascinating and resilient discourse surrounding the historical, formal and contemporary explorations within the field of the ‘reductive' in general and ‘reductive' painting in particular.

COMPOSITE VISIONS comprises the work of 16 international artists and aims to give a modest inside overview of the possibilities within this broad approach. This type of exhibition is never able to display the entire palette of diversity; CCNOA's objective is simply to document some of the thinking around this subject.

Tilman & Petra Bungert CCNOA Brussels

With your Eyes Only @ Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz (AT)

2009-12-12T12:28:00Z

Kunstenaars: Kjell Bjørgeengen (NO), Alexandra Dementieva (RU/BE) & Aernoud Jacobs (BE), Ward Denys (BE), Clemens Hollerer (AT), Simon Ingram (NZ), Léopoldine Roux (FR), Esther Stocker (IT/AT), Tilman (DE), Pieter Vermeersch (BE), Dan Walsh (US), Carrie Yamaoka (US)

CAN centre d'art de Neuchâtel (CH) @ CCNOA

Baldassarri, Da Mata, Fischer, Golinski, Widmer — 2009-10-16T11:01:00Z

CCNOA is pleased to present the group exhibition HYPERCONCRET, an exchange project with the CAN (Centre d'Art de Neuchâtel) (CH).

The CAN is a forum for contemporary art focusing on exchange and research, placing it in perspective and providing access to a space for discovery and experimentation. It presents Swiss and international artists, all of whom play a significant part on today's art scene. The public is of prime importance, a public that the Centre sets out not only to inform but also to surprise and question, by providing it with the tools to trigger critical awareness.

The CAN thus has a dual aim: offering the artists an experimental space in which they can create at will and providing them with a privileged meeting point with the public. But all this while bearing in mind that inhabiting an art space means accepting that art raises questions, the answers to which are never further away than the tip of the tongue; it means building sand castles then knocking them down again -– day in, day out.

HYPERCONCRET will question the diverse and complex relations between the works of five artists (Massimiliano Baldassarri, Fred Fischer, Andreas Golinski, Francisco da Mata and Martin Widmer) with reference to the concepts of reality, perception and context. All the works will have a specific relationship with the CCNOA exhibition space, its site and its architecture.

This exhibition invites us to reconsider our perceptual and cognitive habits when faced with works that paradoxically have nothing more in common than their specific formal and thematic singularity.

The project space will present works by Francisco da Mata and the multimedia space will show an audiovisual work by Massimiliano Baldassarri.

Giles Ryder

Ryder — 2009-09-03T15:33:00Z

Giles Ryder's (*1972, Brisbane, Australia) work is preoccupied with abstraction, but his interest is in minimalism. He started life as an artist later than some, having worked as an industrial painter on Brisbane's Story Bridge for six years before entering art school. The industrial influence, alongside that of the great abstractionists such as Rothko, is visible in his art with glossy, hard surfaces of color evoking ‘car culture'. He also uses neon signage and the reflective surfaces of advertising and consumption, and pared back, pearlescent and glossy striped paintings. All of these require interactivity with the viewer - the position from which the work is seen directly influences its effect. “I see my work as a hybrid between minimalism, abstraction, Op- and Pop Art. My practice includes the intention to develop reductionist concepts (of form, space, line and material), the effects of color (visually, as a signature, and its psychological effects) and the experiential qualities of painting. By developing these concepts I invite the viewer in the space to a contemplative encounter with painting.” (G.R.)

1+2+3+4 — La Station, Nice (FR) @ CCNOA

2009-09-03T09:43:00Z

ARTISTS: Paul Chazal (FR), Marc Chevalier FR, Fayçal Baghriche (DZ/FR), Alexandra Guillot (FR), Benjamin Hugard (FR), Ludovic Lignon (FR), Ingrid Luche (FR), Émilie Perotto (FR), Damien Sorrentino-Florentz (FR), Cédric Teisseire (FR)

La Station offers an experimental platform within which up-and-coming artists can find conditions conducive to initiating projects and participating in the development, promotion and dissemination of their activities. This enabling initiative started in Nice in 1996 allows the emergence of research in real and professional exhibition or production conditions. La Station was originally housed within the walls of a former service station located at 26 boulevard Gambetta in Nice from which it took its name, then moved on according to the realities of the places that sheltered it. The relevance of La Station lies in a desire to offer an extra link connecting artists, institutions, art centers, galleries and the public as closely as possibly, trying to give added value to the existing cultural panorama. In addition to its internal programs, over the years La Station has acquired a national and European audience thanks to exhibitions organized in various cities abroad. On the extramural front La Station constructs its projects from the starting point of the work of the artists that constitute it and their particular artistic practices, put into a new perspective in the context of a collective exhibition, so approaching the whole thing in a unity of place, time and space. The exhibition 1+2+3+4 is to be seen in this perspective. 10 artists of different generations and heterogeneous practices brought together in the CCNOA exhibition spaces. The sum of these individualities offers through all possible combinations a composite body. The idea would be to explore the boundaries of abstraction, where the forms of representation, of figuration, of the radical conceptual approaches overlap and rub against each other. A kind of Ecocline (a gradient of vegetation structure correlating to variation in environmental characteristics) between a chilled figuration and an abstraction reheated by subjectivity. The intention is not to adapt to the territory, but instead to widen its boundaries, to push further the limits of the practices without ever limiting oneself to a style.

link: www.lastation.org

1/256-256/256 (256 different kinds of black)

Billet — 2009-06-27T12:40:18Z

Book

31,5 cm x 22,5 cm

Edition of 4

1500 euros

Greet Billet

Billet — 2009-06-19T12:51:00Z

GREET BILLET *1973 in Leuven (BE) / Lives & works in Brussels (BE)

Greet Billet teaches at the Brussels Sint-Lukas College. In her research project The development of the monochrome in its digital and analogue/graphical form of apparition she intends to create a link between the digital and the graphical/analogue. This link could originate by transferring the purest abstraction of the 256 digital color values of one single color (grey, green, red and blue) from a digital carrier to an analogue one and vice versa. Next to this she also asks herself if it would be possible to conceive a box or book containing all the parts of the analogue/graphical monochrome or a film containing all he parts of the digital monochrome. At the core of this thought process we always find the tension between the analogue and the digital monochrome. In fact this tension between objective quantizing and subjective valuing. This way Greet Billet attempts, in her recent work, to explore the possibilities of communication in the field of meaning transference. For an individual an object or an event can have an unequivocal meaning, or at least be unambiguous at a specific moment in time. However, the communication about this object or this event each time shows the impossibility to share this unequivocal meaning. Those involved in the communication create their own interpretations of the object or the event. This way communications manifests itself as the fundamental impossibility to share or communicate meanings. Thus, in 2007 she printed words on mirrors, causing their seemingly unequivocal meaning to be reflected towards the viewer, who was confronted with the purely subjective meaning of what seems to happen objectively when we see a word. Simultaneously the viewer saw his own subjectivity in another space, his mirror image, confronting him with the impossibility to objectify his self. The impossibility to give meaning to our world and us and to communicate this meaning seems to be resolved when using objective quantifiable values going beyond the subjective interpreted evaluation. This research is one about the tension between the digital (objective, numerical) values of colors and their analogue (subjective, equivocal) evaluation. That which manifests itself here is another impossibility: reality cannot be captured into objectively delimited categories or numerical variables. There are no colors as such in the physical reality. All there is a continuum of frequencies of light reflection and absorption. In reality we can clearly separate one object from another, but we cannot do that with color. A color such as “red” is not a mere subjective evaluation of a specific, though not strictly fathomable spectral range. It is once again an evaluation that cannot be communicated. What I see as “red” could very well be “green” to someone else. By convention we agree to name this frequency “red”, but its subjective appreciation can fundamentally differ. People who are colorblind can live their lives without ever realizing that they are colorblind. They say “red” when it is red, but what exactly do they see? The only objective experience seems to be the most subjective.