Hans Op de Beeck — Le Centquatre-Paris — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 22 → December 31, 2016

Hans Op de Beeck — Le Centquatre En recevant Hans Op de Beeck, le Centquatre a imaginé une exposition qui nous plonge avec délice dans l’univers englobant et profon... 2 - Bien Critique

The architectures and landscapes invented by Hans Op de Beeck sway between reality and fiction. At Centquatre-Paris, the Flemish artist opens the doors of some of his parallel worlds, inviting the spectator to bring the stories to life by the strength of his/her imagination.

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In his works, whether they be sculptures, drawings, videos or photos, or more recently, plays, Hans Op de Beeck stages parallel worlds. He minutely creates architectures and landscapes, often deserted and monochromatic, that belong as much to reality as to fiction.

Hans Op de Beeck, Staging Silence (2), 2013 Video 20’48" — Black and White, Sound, Full HD Video transferred to Blu-Ray Disc Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins/Habana

For Centquatre-Paris, the artist is building The Settlement (2), an entirely grey monumental installation, showing a strange and peaceful village made up of about 20 houses on stilts, linked together by wood scaffolding. Boats moored to accessories (fishing nets, deadwood, rudimentary tools, fairy-lights, etc.), each element as been sculpted at full scale. The whole has been placed on an artificial lake, in front of an empty wall that invites the spectator to watch, at first from a certain distance, this imaginary scene. At once alive and immobile, it brings to mind cinematic tradition, the composite image, but also the paralysed nature of Pompei, fixed in time by volcanic ashes. Nevertheless, this village, a fictional refuge of a small imaginary community and all sorts of potential stories, seems to be contemporary and still inhabited. As always with Hans Op de Beeck, the spectator doesn’t know whether he is faced with a land that has been deserted or that is on the point of being created. Parallel to this, the artist is showing two recent films.

Staging Silence (2) (2013) shows with a certain poetry a succession of landscapes being built. On screen, two pairs of arms busy themselves around a square metre set, on which they manipulate objects, scenery and artificial lighting to create recognisable environments with limited resources.

Hans Op de Beeck, Night Time, 2015 Animated Film, 19’20" — Black-and-White, Sound, Full HD Video Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins/Habana

Night Time (extended) (2015) is an enigmatic and dark animated film, without a text, based on a long series of monumental monochromatic watercolours. Painted by night, in a lonely and concentrated state, they bring to mind the tangible presence of the nocturnal atmosphere in nature or urban landscapes, inside or outside scenes, sometimes filled with characters. In all of these immobile or animated spaces, three-dimensional or not, Hans Op de Beeck invites the spectator to let himself be carried away by visual references and to make up his own stories.

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Hans Op de Beeck is a multidisciplinary artist who creates large installations, as well as sculptures, films, videos, photographs, paintings, drawings, texts, plays or music. Born in 1969 in Flemish Belgium, he regularly shows his work all over the world (Europe, United States, China, etc.) in group or solo exhibitions. He recently wrote and directed his first play, Nach dem Fest, for the Schauspiel in Frankfurt, for which he also created the scenery, the costumes and the music.