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"Regression"
installation 2014
Wood, wax
According to the Greek Vitruvius there were three principles to architecture: Beauty, Solidity & Usefulness. In the work of Vansteenkiste none of these three principles is a certainty or a goal.
His creations can be seen more as meta-architecture. In his work he counters feelings that we usually associate with a habitat with their opposites: Rooms do not only offer shelter, protection and comfort, they can also trap and suffocate us.
In this way the houses of Vansteenkiste become a sort of mental space, a vehicle for emotions and thoughts of the artist as well as those of the person watching, experiencing or entering the space.
In Regression as well safety and stability are an illusion. The light that defines the structure and makes it present in the surroundings, is silently and insidiously also causing its downfall.
The wax is transforming and it is loosing its capacity under the warmth of the light, wich will eventually make the structure slowly evolve and deform.
Psychologists connect the term regression with a person going back into the past, mostly as a mechanism of surpression or defension against things that are at that moment hard to deal with. Regression as a symbol for returning to a previous state.
Regression was made in colaboration withthe Candle making workshop of MIVALTI, Tielt, a counseling centre for people with a mental disability.
In 2015 Jonas Vansteenkiste and the artist of Mivalti where invited by Art Festival Watou to show Regression and where challenged to make a new piece. They have taken one of the rooms out of the work Regression and enlarged it to a room that the audience can enter and in wich they have put objectes created out of parafine (wax). All of the objects were chosen for a personal reason, copied in wax and pilled up in a fragile way in the new installation "Fragments".
The visitor is invited into a selfmade world of homly brittleness.
Those who stand still for a while can feel how the light slowly shines dangerously and in a almost sacred way on the house an the objects in the room, to slowly melt the work into the creases of time.
curator
Frederik Van Laere
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