Ger van Elk

Born in 1941 in Amsterdam, he lives and works there. 

At first sight, the art of Ger van Elk seems to proceed from nonsense, the absurd, and even irony. His films of the early 1970s depict incongruous actions: shaving a cactus, or levelling the surface of a canal. Today, he makes impressionistic images vibrate by animating the pixels of an LCD screen. But this is where we find the spirit of van Elk's project: in the resolution of opposites, whether they be physical, spatial, or temporal. His oeuvre stands at an unlikely crossroads, at an impossible equilibrium, at the centre of a symmetry bordering on vertigo. For van Elk, if art is to be valid, it must stigmatise movement, or rather the moment of physical and mental transition.

The collection of works being shown at Les Jacobins demonstrate the way in which van Elk translates this into sculpture and image. Between crystallisation and dissolution, they reveal the point at which he has chosen to cut, without fear or favour, into the duplicity of the visible and the order of things.