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Jan Vercruysse

09.22.06 - 10.15.06
Installation — Hôtel-Dieu

Jan Vercruysse, view of exhibition, Hôtel Dieu, Toulouse, 2006

© Printemps de septembre, photo André Morin

Jan Vercruysse, exhibition view, Hôtel Dieu, Toulouse, 2006

© Printemps de septembre, photo André Morin

Born in 1948 in Ostend (Belgium), he lives in Belgium.

 

Jan Vercruysse has retained from his writing experience a fondness for quotation and linguistic games. His work is organized around lengthy series: Tombs, Chambers, Atopias, Places...These sculptural ensembles with their rigorous construction and refined elegance refer to a geometry of thought which derives originally from the history of cultural and aesthetic codes. In the words of the art historian Marianne Brouwer, “The works of Jan Vercruysse are like a set made up of rhetorical elements borrowed from art itself, from the theatre, and from architecture”.

 

For le Printemps de septembre, Vercruysse is exhibiting a new configuration of the Placesseries in the Salle des Pèlerins at the Hôtel Dieu, in it he uses the language of playing cards to delve deeper into the notions of absence and presence, loss and memory, and, more essentially, the philosophical concept of places (i.e. place). The metal sheets, with perforated playing card motifs, are laid on the floor like tombstones. Instead of commemorative inscriptions, they describe a hand of poker or a text transcribed into the language of cards.