Wernier Cuvelier at Galerie Nadja Vilenne
With this formidable exhibition, Gallery Nadja Vilenne brings collectively six main our bodies of labor from the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s by the Ghent-based Conceptual artist Werner Cuvelier. The present focuses on Cuvelier’s photography-based “Statistic Initiatives,” which frequently incorporate drawings and sketches that reveal the strict protocols he developed inside his observe. Bruggen van Gent, 1981, paperwork each bridge in Ghent, with out each revealing the titular constructions; as a substitute, Cuvelier instructed a photographer good friend to seize the views from the center of every bridge. The artist later juxtaposed the photographs in lengthy vertically-oriented sequences organized on tables or alongside the partitions. The ensuing compositions are summary and formally compelling, obscuring their topic however successfully bringing the story of their making to the forefront.
The photographic collage Retrato de L.N, 1980, organizes small portraits of all 129 inhabitants of the Spanish village of Las Negras right into a grid, a kind of periodic desk of faces. Right here, the viewer is confronted with a piece that’s without delay scientific—journalistic, even—and totally poetic and inventive. Cuvelier paid nice consideration to types. He selected his colours fastidiously and stuffed the gaps within the grid (representing these residents who didn’t want to the be photographed) with glue patterns impressed by the work of Dan Van Severen. Though algorithmic in nature, Cuvelier’s work finally addresses the intangibilities of the human expertise.
— Piero Bisello
