OSTEND .- What can architecture do for visual art? Many aspects that play an obvious role in architecture can also count on the interest of a good many artists. Some examples. The relationship between materials and structures. The tension between literal and figurative: the building as a concrete construction and as an appearance. The relationship between, on the one hand, the everyday experience and functional use of a space and, on the other hand, buildings or rooms as metaphors of a past, as bearers of stories and histories, or as scars, testifying to destruction, loss, trauma. The city or the house as a mould into which life is poured. How transitions between inside and outside or between below and above are shaped. The creation of a place or a view. The shelter and security of a home, the necessity of a roof. And above all: the shaping, creation, release of space - that intangible negative of everything drawn, planned, built, and which ultimately, by definition, can only be experienced from within.

Exactly the latter is the cause of one of the great enigmas and eternal challenges for every visual artist, for which no recipe or formula can ever be of service: how do I create, capture, evoke space in an image? Never is this ability definitively acquired, and this is because the image of a space is a contradiction in terms. After all, a space cannot be surveyed at a glance: the blind spot behind our heads is an inseparable part of our spatial experience. The challenge is to include this lacuna, this 'nothingness' in the image. Only in this way can this image give the viewer access to its space.

There are undeniable differences between the respective practices of architecture and art. Since modernity, art has been doing without a foundation, every artist bricoling his or her own rickety bridge over the bottomless chasm between how we assume the world is, and how we think it could or should be. On the other hand: blissful are those who do not have to worry about the myriad laws and practical objections, needs and constraints that architects find themselves bound by. The whole process of making architecture is so incredibly indirect: how many plans have to be signed and approved before one stone is laid in concrete?

No, let's do the liberal arts, whose practitioners may or may not be inspired by aspects of the architectural business, but who at the same time play, juggle, fold, cut, paste, assemble at will, shifting or condensing, making appearances and disappearances, nimble or ambiguous, gently probing or at the snap of a finger, in the space between something and nothing.

Frank Maes

valerie_troost gallery
In the Space between Something and Nothing
Opens January 14th