Rinus Van de Velde: The Villagers

Rinus Van de Velde pulls at the threads of cultural and intellectual history with a practice that operates through a system of imagination, quotation, reference and adaption. Over the years he has increasingly evolved towards a total artist with a diverse practice that encompasses drawing, sculpture, installation and film. Central in his works is the tension between fiction and reality, playing with different alter-ego narratives, quoting art history, cinema or literature and constructing an alternative universe where his narratives come to life. 

For his fifth solo exhibition at Tim Van Laere Gallery, Van de Velde brings together the premiere of his first film, three installations, small scale color pencil drawings and large scale charcoal drawings. This film, entitled The Villagers, was recorded entirely in the artist’s studio, featuring his friends, assistants, gallerist and himself. The storyline was completely developed out of the 17 decors that were build out of cardboard in the artist’s studio. This results in a concatenation of individual fragments that are only connected to each other through the sequence and editing of the scenes. The film follows the lives of a series of characters who live in a small village in an undefined landscape. The realistic production of high quality contrasts with the constructed, abstracted environment and the fictional characters that are played by no professionally trained actors. This emphasizes the tension between fiction and reality and ensures that we as spectators have little guidance. It all feels so familiar, but at the same time it is so clearly rooted in fake, copy and counterfeit, because no element pretends to be “real”.

The three installations in the exhibition, show the three life-size decors that were build in the artist’s studio and play a significant role in The Villagers. They display the eye of detail the artist has put in the making of the decors, making even the smallest attribute like coffee cups, hamburgers and light fixtures out of cardboard, making it one fictitious whole. The decors and scenes that took place where also appropriated in the large scale charcoal drawings and small scale color drawings where they reveal new aspects of the greater narrative. In other drawings he quotes on works of other artists and recontextualises the image to fit in with his narrative with which he creates a paradigm shift that prompts a re-evaluation of the trajectories that objects and ideas travel across time and media.

Rinus Van de Velde (1983) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Recent solo exhibitions include S.MA.K., Ghent, Belgium; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, The Netherlands; CAC Malaga, Malaga, Spain; Kunstpalais Erlangen, Germany; Baerum Kulturhus, Sandvika, Norway; Nest, The Hague, The Netherlands, among others.