BORGLOON.- Resethome is a sculpture, an artist residency and an exhibition venue combined. Conceived and built by the Belgian artist Gert Robijns in the footprint of his grandmother’s former home, as a free space for art, RESETHOME is dedicated to bringing artists and audiences together in the village of Borgloon, Limburg.
On 9 April 2017, Resethome welcomed its first illustrious guest, the artist Luc Tuymans, with his solo exhibition ‘The Swamp’. Luc Tuymans is one of the few artists who, from the 90ies onwards, continually questioned and redefined painting, thereby recalibrating the medium’s potential on a global scale.
‘The Swamp’, consists of 3 art works, each made in very different media.
Setting the conceptual tone, ‘Shadows’ has been made by tracing the shadows cast on the floor by the sun shining through the windows with chalk. The inner shell of Resethome thus becomes a three-dimensional drawing: a graphic installation. With the passage of time an overlap occurs, as newly cast shadows cross over drawn shadows, accentuating the earth’s orbit around the sun. As an introverted sundial, it draws attention to the precision involved in capturing a specific time and place. Every day, at one moment – Belgian weather permitting – the shadows, both drawn and real, will appear to coincide. However, no exact synchronisation is possible until the earth has completed its year-long revolution around the sun. With simple means, the room becomes a timer that is counting down, poignantly bringing into view the inexorable slippage of time and the futility of chalked-in memories.*
A second work, ‘Plates’, reprises a series of lithographs of industrial china crockery that was mass-produced during the soviet era in Croatia. The plates’ innocuous, domestic appearance belies the ideological structures and industrial complexity that enabled their production and dissemination. Depicted frontally, as if displayed on a wall, the paintings of the plates are here reproduced as stickers and attached to the windows. They therefore cast their own shadow. The painted highlights reflecting off the golden rim of each plate in turn visually invoke a luminous orbit.
The space upstairs accommodates a floor painting entitled ‘The Swamp’ after a work the artist painted in 2017. The painting’s wooden base, raising it slightly off the floor, involves some perspectival trickery: the irregular rhomboid shape draws the viewer in: amongst the patches of light the advancing, crawling figure of a person in camouflage can be discerned, leaving no shadow of a doubt upon which impending world events the artist is speculating.
This is the only one-person show Luc Tuymans is presenting in 2017.
Resethome offers a place for artistic production and reflection: it hosts residencies for artists and periodic exhibitions. Designed to draw contemporary visual art, artists and audiences to the Limburg region, local and from further afield, it aims to open up the village of Borgloon to an effervescent dialogue with contemporary art.
*This work echoes the pieces ENDE that Luc Tuymans realized in 2007 at Kabinett für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremerhaven, when he painted the small exhibition space grey and the shadows of the window frames were highlighted in white. It also recalls a work the artist made for the exhibition Before it disappears and afterwards in Watou, Belgium (1998), for which he painted in the shadows of cars parked in a street.
