5 at Hole Of The Fox

Artists: Johnny Gustafsson, Oscar Hugal, Elena Minyeyevtseva, Leon Sadler, Natali Sarkisyan, Valgerður Sigurðardóttir, Yannick Val Gesto, Vincent Vandaele, Benny Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx, Tom Volkaert

Exhibition title: 5

Venue: Hole Of The Fox, Antwerp, Belgium

Date: December 9 – 25, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Hole Of The Fox

Hole Of The Fox turned five years old in December 2016 and ‘5’ was a group exhibition set up to celebrate the anniversary, focussing on the works of the invited artists.

Johnny Gustafsson:
Artist Johnny Gustafsson is mainly active on Deviantart.com. He obsessively creates fan art from his favourite anime, manga and western style comics and animations, and has been doing so for over 6 years, posting his results on the website. He continuously maintains the same style of drawing, slightly evolving over the years and shifting from bright colors to simply the color of the ballpoint pen.

Shown here are 4 drawings selected from his, at the time (early november), last 50 uploaded drawings on Deviantart. In the meantime, over 50 new drawings have been added already.

Oscar Hugal:
The practice of Oscar Hugal is indirectly, but strongly influenced by conceptual art and institutional critique. His recent drawings and objects reflect on the act of production and “making work work”. His practice can be read as the reconstruction of a disrupted narrative that only the artist can put together.

‘The Literal Meaning’ is a hypothetical IQ test based upon several image-text paintings by René Magritte. ‘A Tool of Comparison’ is an approximately A4 sized piece of graph paper which was torn out of a larger sheet at sight.

Elena Minyeyevtseva:
In this moment, Elena Minyeyevtseva’s works revolve around the topic ‘absence of information’, the immediate production of a drawing and indirect ways of building an image.

Escape plan 1.2 is a reconstructed plan based on the perspective of a waterfall, which functions as the medium to fall into a new space. There is no information about the other side. It may only provoke curiosity or fear. Black holes appear in the sky and in the water and transform or get transformed as a shape, referring to what used to be an ellipse.

Minyeyevtseva uses a technical pencil, building up her drawings in many layers, to sculpt the fictional image into its realistic, visible form.

Leon Sadler:
Sadler is rigorously working on his drawing practice as a base for explorations into painting and sculpture ideas. Informed by his background in graphics and comics, looking for the right shapes and feelings to create “STRONG IMAGES”. Often depicting power struggles, emotional landscapes and reflecting on non-human entities.

Regarding the piece ‘Standard Fantasy: Trying To Dream Bigger’, he was trying to imagine “what would be the ULTIMATE painting” and an image popped his my head of a Chris Foss spaceship cruising over a Breugel landscape. This watercolour definitely isn’t THAT painting, but he thought he needed to start to do at least something working towards THE ULTIMATE PAINTING so this his first footstep on that long road. Sadler knows he may never make THAT painting, but is very happy with the one he made. He thinks it’s a strong image.

The 2nd piece is a commission from Yannick Val Gesto (also in the exhibition), he asked Sadler to do a drawing for him to use inside one of his digital collages. The reference points he specifically requested were a strange scratchy illustration he found on deviant art, some images maybe from a LOTR game, and some photos of lava.

Natali Sarkysian:
On the edge between abstract and figurative, the artworks of Natali are always bound to recreate the profound and yet esoteric nature of a subject. Traveling to Belgium from Bulgaria and changing her cultural environment has made impact on her art. She experiences her own artworks as analyses, thoughts or sometimes simple associations, reflecting on philosophical matters, ethics, social phenomena, the nature of modern man and the bloom of the individualism.

In this series of drawings, she introduces her vision of ‘Truth Belief Justification’ – a theory used in philosophy to define and acknowledge suggestive theories, ideas and classify them. She portrayed the Truth, the Belief and the Justification, giving them appearance and a character.

Valgerður Sigurðardóttir:
Valgerður Sigurðardóttir is from Reykjavík, Iceland and now lives and works in Antwerp. She graduated with a bachelor degree from the Icelandic academy of arts in 2015 and is currently studying in KASK in Gent. Valgerður mostly works in sculpture and her work is often based on wordplay and personal narratives.

The pieces in this show are colored, plaster reliefs derived from rebus puzzles.

Yannick Val Gesto:
At it’s core, Val Gesto’s work is fueled by entertainment driven properties as well as basic human emotions, self-knowledge and information. It’s the modern era’s eclectism and exotism – spawned from our need to digitally share and explore – that defines his body of work.

Here, Val Gesto shows two recent digital drawings, following up on the idea of trying to capture this endless spawn of digital imagery.

Vincent Vandaele:
Vincent Vandaele mainly works as a sculptor, making use of wood and construction material and a range of objects that are common/abundant in our (western) society. Vandaele’s oeuvre consists of drawings, photographs, installations, video, sculpture, sculpture as part of installation, multiples and compositions of ready mades. His work questions the function and context of a given object, resulting in a play that can redefine some of the many things that surround us.

As for his piece in the exhibition:

– Wow, that tall guy needs to cheer up, huh?

– Yeah, he must not be having his best day.

– Yeah…

Benny Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx:
Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx is both artist and the initiator of Hole Of The Fox. He perceives people, artists and himself as masters of masquerade and tries to capture this in drawings, paintings, sculpture, and so on, fixating on the “look” of the other and finishing up a recent series of works on the ‘Black knight’ icon, using source material stemming from popular manga.

For this show, however, given the context he decided to draw out five number fives and spread them across the space, like hidden easter eggs for visitors to find. Therefore, his pieces are not drawn on the map of the exhibition. Can you find all five?

Tom Volkaert:
Volkaert’s artistic practice is strongly interwoven with his part-time job as an art handler. The materials he works with are the same materials he uses in his art, revisiting these in his atelier and working with them in a bold and primitive way. By using these types of materials, he questions the sacral nature of art, while creating with them enigmatic and humoristic shapes.

‘Tour de Salami’ is a series of pieces where he researches the relationship between the wall sculpture and the painting, building on an earlier series of his: ‘Steering wheels and accessories’. Volkaert tries to compensate for his lack of knowledge in painting by using alternative materials.

Yannick Val Gesto, Broken face, 2016, digital drawing

Oscar Hugal, The Literal Meaning, 2016, chalk on paper, aluminum frame

Oscar Hugal, A Tool of Comparison, 2015, graph paper, cardboard, aluminum frame

Natali Sarkisyan, Truth Belief Justification, 2016, Pencil, silk paper,ink on paper

Valgerður Sigurðardóttir, whole/brain, 2016, plaster

Johnny Gustafsson, Long time no see, Alita, 2016, ballpoint pen

Tom Volkaert, Tour De Salami ♯2, 2016, concrete, silicone, ceramics, pigment

Johnny Gustafsson, There’s a woman on my block, 2016, ballpoint pen

Oscar Hugal, The Literal Meaning, 2016, chalk on paper, aluminum frame

Natali Sarkisyan, The wave of now, 2016, pencil, ink, charcoal, correction fluid,pastel on paper

Valgerður Sigurðardóttir, horn, 2016, plaster

Leon Sadler, Drawing for Y. Val Gesto (Self-portrait as Shrek trapped in Mordor), 2015, solvent ink, highlighter and gel pen on paper

Elena Minyeyevtseva, Escape plan 1.2, 2016, pencil on paper

Yannick Val Gesto, Red face, 2016, digital drawing

Johnny Gustafsson, Tifas Jackpott, 2016, ballpoint pen

Vincent Vandaele, Cheer up guys :–<, 2016, wallpaper, ink, plywood, paint, oriental mix

Tom Volkaert, Tour De Salami ♯3, 2016, concrete, silicone, ceramics, pigment

Valgerður Sigurðardóttir, the raisin in the end of the sausage, 2016, plaster

Oscar Hugal, The Literal Meaning, 2016, chalk on paper, aluminum frame

Valgerður Sigurðardóttir, heal-l, 2016, plaster

Natali Sarkisyan, Extraction of a drawing, 2015, Japanese paper collage, pencil and pastels on paper

Johnny Gustafsson, Conquest, 2016, ballpoint pen

Oscar Hugal, The Literal Meaning, 2016, chalk on paper, aluminum frame

Valgerður Sigurðardóttir, A bit too much, 2016, plaster

Leon Sadler, Standard Fantasy: Trying To Dream Bigger, 2016, dye-based aquarelle, aquarelle pastel on paper with plastic grommets

Valgerður Sigurðardóttir, broken, 2016, plaster

Tom Volkaert, Tour De Salami ♯1, 2016, concrete, silicone, ceramics, pigment

Natali Sarkisyan, Truth Belief Justification 2, 2016, pencil, pastel on paper

Benny Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx, Five fives, 2016, pencil, East-Indian ink, aquarelle, ballpoint pen