Opening:
Thursday, April 4, 6-9 pm
The works of Kristof Santy (*1987 in Belgium, lives and works in Roeselare) touch on the intersection of singularity and commonality. By abstracting his subjects to their most essential, immediately recognizable forms, and subsequently reconstructing them with elements drawn from his perceptive discoveries, from memory, and personal involvement, they acquire a sense of familiarity without drifting into generalization. Instead, through this intuitive process of subtraction and addition, Santy allows the viewer to engage with his paintings through a shared experience of sociability. In this sense, his works resemble Images d’Épinal: idealized, accessible visions of life that activate our collective consciousness.
Collectivity is also conceptionally embedded in Santy’s subjects. Despite the deliberate rejection of internal narrative, each work is imbued with a kind of associative metadata, and in particular the reminiscence of human presence. These objects are thus artifacts rather than naturalia, designed for functionality: Whether it is a screw, a coffee machine, a sink, or a food platter, the artist’s iconography of the mundane consistently implies human intervention. Hence, present objects empathetically coexist with anthropoid energies that have already disappeared or are yet to get involved.
And even if we as human beings, as creators and users, are somehow implicated, this doesn’t mean that we control access to the realities of Santy’s compositions. Rather, we assume a passive role, the subjects almost literally approaching us: They extend dangerously close to the edge of the canvas, their format allowing them to incessantly push the limits of their assigned plane, threatening to suck us into their realm. Therefore, by rescaling his subjects in size and content, i.e. adapting them to the exclusive rules of their medial and pictorial codification, Santy creates a precarious, intimidating balance that alters the subjects’ relationship to their physical environment, reshaping our bodily awareness in the process.
Similarly, with narration always remaining a mere assumption, the immobility of Santy’s paintings disrupts our conventional understanding of time as a continuous sequence of existence unfolding in a seemingly linear progression from the past, through the present, and into the future. Instead, Santy’s works exude a transtemporal tranquillity, a stillness derived from a unique dichotomy of formal and substantial planarity: Recurring, bright colors, geometrized and flattened shapes cover the canvas with precise, smooth brushwork, remodeling it into a surface with spatial potential rather than pictorial depth in the traditional sense.
In this manner, spatiality emerges not from perspective but through color, offering an expanded perspective on Greenberg’s concept of flatness. This flatness, which recurs almost circularly throughout the history of art (one need only think of medieval art as well as Fauvism and abstract painting), in Santy’s case simultaneously presupposes and facilitates an unexpected monumentality of what is depicted. This same monumentality, although created in two dimensions, extends into the third, pointing both to the surroundings and to the viewer. In this way, every element is unfolded, everything is visible, legible, and comprehensible.
In Epinal, Santy therefore sets the stage for collective perception by offering us an archive of life’s fragments, a re-conceptualisation, and re-enactment of the pictorial dialectic between surface and depth, fact and effect, materiality and meaning. Deliberately shifting from narrative to quietly magnifying the everyday, the artist examines the mundane, challenges us to confront the familiar with heightened awareness, and encourages reflection on our own Images d’Épinal. (Teresa Kamencek, 2024)
© Kristof SANTY, Schmink, 2024
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