Artist: Soetkin Verslype
Exhibition title: A Flower, A Chair
Venue: Base-Alpha, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: January 13 – February 26, 2022
Photography: We Document Art, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Base-Alpha, Antwerp
The works of Soetkin Verslype arise from a love for the medium and a search for intuition within the creative process. She is mainly inspired by everyday objects and compositions from her immediate environment. Often these are not subjects that scream for attention, but rather scenes that stimulate her visually because of their potential to be stylized.
The painting process is comparable to the construction of a mosaic, in which different abstract shapes are placed next to each other to form a recognizable image. The way in which Verslype paints these shapes enables her to play in a subtle way with the relationships between foreground and background, positive and negative forms, depth and focus and how these can function in relation to each other. In this way, interactions arise between forms that may in reality exist at different distances from each other, resulting in situations/paintings that make banal subjects look atypical and strange.
The color scheme seems to be following this line of thought. Her color palette invariably remains monochrome, for each work she determines whether it will look warm, cool or fresh. This choice of color is also completely separate from the image that Verslype originally saw. It seems like an automatic color inversion occurred while watching.
For Soetkin Verslype, the focus is on the process as well as the creation of an image that can function autonomously, separate from a story.
