Joris Van de Moortel — Erratum Musicale for 3 guitars and a metronome — Les filles du calvaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 4 → June 16, 2012

Defying artistic categories, Joris van de Moortel’s work can be described as sculptural, architectural, performative, musical, pictorial, or even pertaining to the installation art genre. Similarly, various historical references are encompassed in his practice. But they are portrayed indirectly, through subverted art forms.

“Getting to grips with Joris Van de Moortel’s oeuvre is like taking a plunge into the thick of a storm. Hewing out a groove within a whirlwind of forms, an accumulation of materials and sounds, driving in their wake the scattered elements of one and the same set of issues. What does inhabiting space mean, and how is its construction to be thought of?

Far from being reduced to joyful odes to destruction, his installations relaunch the charge inherent in their own definition; the work is bound to be “installed” in space. If we often find caissons, those precarious shelters which seem to minimalize the concept of architecture, what is involved, in each one of his works, is the use of a place calling to mind the extent to which human spatial claims are forms of violence. Violence of the object, violence of occupation, and also and above all the violence done to our way of looking at things, that awakening through the force of passivity, forbidding the spectator to be immobile. For behind the generosity, behind the pleasure of accumulation, there hides the real secret of these insane dwellings, filled with blow-lamps, broken window panes and slivers and shards of materials; a modesty in action huddled in those cramped spaces where, despite its relative precariousness, life is definitely possible. And life appears in many forms in this world lived in by recurrent motifs forever being renewed. An invisible energy which runs through all his works and rustles like the shudder of a cataclysm tracing a new understanding of destruction. […]”