2006
slide show
3 projectors / driver / 63 slides / 10 min. 52 sec.
solo show at Maison Grégoire, Brussels, 2006
The slide installation Jardin Grégoire, based on twenty-one large oil paintings on canvas (h 215 x w 145cm), shows fragments of the garden path at Grégoire House, designed by Henry Van de Velde in 1933. He also designed the garden, with its architectural spaces that feel like indoor rooms, at the time. The dark paintings reveal a path that winds between the trees and always ends up at the same spot.
In the Jardin Grégoire slide installation, the paintings are only used in reproduction. By converting a painting into a slide, a gap is created between what we experience and what we know (or think we do). Even though the reality of the garden is never far off, the different layers of these depictions gradually take the viewer into another state. The marked physical absence of the paintings means the notion of a memory imposes itself. So that each moment in the slide show is marked by absence and inaccessibility. And yet with each newly projected image you are in danger of once again believing in the illusion of the paintings. Until you are again struck by the aforementioned paradox and can only see the physicality and plasticity of the painted image that is imprisoned within the beam of light from a slide projector.
LEEN VOET 