PARIS.- Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, announced Rinus Van de Velde's first solo exhibition in France. Through a new series of oil pastels on paper and charcoal on canvas, alongside a video work and a monumental sculpture, the artist immerses the viewer in various scenarios from his fictional autobiography.

Van de Velde's narrative style spans a range of media, from drawing and installation to video and sculpture. Since the late 2010s, the artist has been supplementing his emblematic monochrome charcoal palette, which he describes as well suited to ‘the documentation of his fake life’, with coloured works that have evolved into larger compositions over time. The artist inscribes his drawings with handwritten texts that imbue the scenes with insinuated meanings.

Depicting whimsical self-portraits in his monochromatic canvases, Van de Velde creates a world of illusions that bears witness to a life he could have lived but has not. His multiple alter egos open up to infinite possibilities and reject the limiting contingencies of reality and its empiricism, which are by definition restrictive.

Freed from the burden of truth, Van de Velde seeks to question the very nature of reality. What is reality? The shadows we see on cave walls, as in Plato's myth? Perhaps. After all, the artist states, ‘the first pictorial productions of humanity were parietal shadows’. Van de Velde's representations unravel the thread of an imaginary journey, that of the artist who does not embark on a Grand Tour of Italy to admire the Old Masters, so popular in the Eighteenth Century, but rather engages in dialogue with artists from David Hockney to Claude Monet, Liu Xiaodong to Peter Doig. Thus, a sun-drenched swimming pool, a busy seaside, a shed in the snowy mountains, a house in the dark forest… such scenes all reference the painters who have forever marked art history.

Depicting their landscapes as he envisages them, Van de Velde pretends to be a pleinairist himself – a notion far away from his actual practice since he deploys his entire pictorial universe from within his studio walls. He paints in the manner of a remote hermit, stretching out the adventurous wanderings of his inner mind from the comfort of a secure and invulnerable interior. While the charcoal works depict Van de Velde himself as a character, the majority of his colourful oil pastel works only insinuate a human presence. With this physical absence, Van de Velde instead leans into an array of styles drawn from the art historical greats, summoning a space in which the fantastical can flourish – for both artist and viewer alike. Imagining an intimate conversation with these painters becomes more powerful than an actual exchange. Here liberated from the limitations of time, availability or topography, these parallel encounters go further than reality allows.

In his film A Life in A Day, 2021–2023, Van de Velde imagines himself painting outdoors in an expansive, luxuriant jungle. One prop from his studio-made decorum, a cardboard palm tree, has been transposed into the physical space of the gallery. Van de Velde does not work with real objects but rather with a representation of them. Thus, it is not Van de Velde himself who acts in the film, but one of his friends wearing a mask in his likeness. In this way, an illusion of the real, the cardboard palm tree, takes over the real; just as in the film, an element of fiction, the mask mimicking the real Van de Velde, takes over the fiction. In these slippages between fable and fact, Van de Velde questions the ways in which we deal with the porous and undefined boundaries that exist between truth and illusion.

Rinus Van de Velde (b. 1983, Leuven) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held in international institutions including Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2024); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (2023); BOZAR, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2022); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne; FRAC des Pays de la Loire (both 2021); KWM artcentre, Beijing; Bærum Kulturhus, Sandvika (both 2019); Kunstpalais Erlangen (2018); Nest, The Hague (2017); Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague (2016); S.M.A.K, Ghent (2015, 2008); Kunsthalle São Paulo (2015); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Malaga (2013); Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (2012); Institut für zeitgenössische Kunst, Nürnberg (2010); and Lokaal 001, Antwerp (2008).

Van de Velde’s works are in the collections of A.Z. Artgestion Collection, Bilbao; Belfius Art Collection, Brussels; CAC Malaga; Colección SOLO, Madrid; Erasmus University Rotterdam; Ghisla Art Collection, Locarno; FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Nantes; Karel De Grote Hogeschool, Antwerp; Kunsthalle São Paulo; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague; KPN Art Collection; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne; KWM artcenter, Beijing; M HKA, Antwerp; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; S.M.A.K., Ghent; and Stad Antwerpen, Antwerp, among others.