NANTES.- For the inaugural exhibition at its new site, the FRAC des Pays de la Loire French Regional Collection of Contemporary Art has tasked Belgian artist Rinus Van de Velde [born in 1983 in Leuven] with devising a one-man exhibition that also features a subjective selection of artworks from the FRAC collections, as well as allowing for an active and cordial exchange with the artist Kati Heck [born in 1979 in Düsseldorf]. Both artists are part of a forward-looking scene based in Antwerp and work with the Tim Van Laere Gallery, whose approach reflects an eye for densely figurative expressiveness, with a post-Punk vibe at times tinged with melancholy, and unfettered by labels. Other artists in this vein include Armen Eloyan, Gelitin and Friedrich Kunath.

An artist’s self-fiction

The exhibition is titled La Ruta Natural, a sequence of letters that can be read in the same way either forwards or backwards and Spanish for “The Natural Route”, which is also the name of a key film work, the palindromic matrix of the artistic journey. It is set in some deserted, Spanish-style world. The video – which combines footage with staged décor, miniature models and accessories – instantly lays the foundations of a dreamworld, a parallel B-side. A man in a red cap and jeans pulls up in a car, and this marks the start of an immersive descent into a cardboard cut-out machine room not unlike the cogwheel workings of a Tinguely piece. For Rinus Van de Velde, this becomes a metaphor of the creative process, in a playground of mathematical formulae, engines and propellors to be activated. All of this conveys the absurd nature of a modern-day Sisyphus, wilfully withdrawn from reality and all alone before his task. This character wears a mask in the form of Rinus Van de Velde’s face, creating a puppet-like look, trapped in an endless loop, which resonates with the strongly autobiographical and saturnine dimension of the work which unfolds like the chapters of a story that is written as days go by.




The video work stems from the production of drawings, large charcoal works painstakingly rendered; to produce these the artist first builds homespun sets. Here is the reconstruction of a room that one might enter, a room with leprous walls in which an iron bed takes pride of place awaiting the final scene, a David Lynchian foray into the subconscious, the site of a dualizing and a form of putting to death that has all the makings of a resurrection. A pistol shot, an acting out, against a red balloon that flies away? Waking from a suicidal nightmare and then re-enacting the scene ad vitam. The Dopplegänger, the artist’s invisible partner, clad in striped pyjamas, is trapped in a mental grid, that of his curving madness. Between the design’s parallel lines is the paradoxical breathing space of spiritual wanderings that constantly come together only to fall apart once more. To the extent that the drawings become one with the words of a friend of the artist, the writer Koen Sels, in a linguistic accentuation that is in no way an explanation, but which acts rather like a voice-over triggered by the text-image montage. One might think of Perec’s Un homme qui dort (A Man Asleep), whose narrative process (in both the book and film) is in many ways very similar to La Ruta Natural. An omniscient voice addresses the individual who is alone in his room, waiting and fighting against time, with apparent indifference: “But, poor Daedalus, there never was a maze. You bogus prisoner! your door was open all the time.”

A multi-faceted exhibition with a unifying narrative This troubled, winding route is not as natural as it seems, insofar as it refers back to an origin that we might prefer to keep buried. The artist admits that his idea was to create a universe in his own image, particularly after discovering a film revealing André Breton’s Parisian apartment on Rue Fontaine as both a private study and the result of a compilation of everything that formed the backdrop to a life devoted to literary fantasy. Ever since, an appetite for a distinctly contemporary personal mythology has become Rinus Van de Velde’s trademark, including a life story played out in a visually artistic incarnation.

This is precisely the point here in this exhibition, one aspect of which adopts a curatorial approach. The fact that Rinus Van de Velde has called on Kati Heck, as friend, serves to shed more light on the interpersonal and narrative dimension that these two artists have in common. Kati paints large-scale works in oils, while Rinus draws in charcoal; yet both are stage directors, creating skits and fictional units that draw on a figurative elaboration of their respective artistic realms. Both work with a combination of different creative mediums, two- or three-dimensional, as if they wanted to better morph their prolific, ramified imaginings, giving them a tangible presence. In the same way, the curatorial selections made by the artist within the FRAC collection reflect the aesthetic family to which he belongs, favouring a marginal vision and flouting any logic of affiliation. Take, for instance, a 1988 work by Rosemarie Trockel: a white shirt bearing the inscription “Justine Juliette Collection Désir”; the shirt is hanging in a glass case in which a real spider is spinning its web, as if in a nose-thumbing take on the world of women in a Marquis de Sade novel, blasting gender categorisations with dynamite. And Laurent Tixador’s Outils (Tools, 2015) suggest a strategy for survival in a world going awry, in the face of which we need to create our own plan of action. Artistic practice, as a means of self-empowerment, could be one possible course. An explosive self-portrait by Arnulf Rainer finally leads us back to the boundaries and inner forces that will need to be mustered, while a Mickey Mouse skull by Armen Eloyan looks us up and down with its empty gaze.

In La Ruta Natural, we therefore see the drawings as an exercise in interpretation, before gradually moving further into the mental cavern of the confined chamber of a duel. All the better to escape once more, and emerge unscathed into a landscape of solar cacti.

Léa Bismuth is an art critic and independent exhibition curator. For her, the exhibition is an ongoing field of experimentation, exploring potential areas of action with literature.