Artist: Kamiel de Waal
Exhibition title: The First Show – Some Beauties
Venue: Moonstreet Projects, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: February 18 – 27, 2022
Photography: Isabelle Arthuis / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Travesía Cuatro, Madrid
Kamiel’s “first” is a first only at the artist’s insistence. A première only in Kamiel’s prayers. Let’s grant the fans the relief of forgetfulness and the artist the benefit of the debut. How very exciting.
An entertaining year-and-half have passed since I wrote a sentence on Kamiel’s work I still very much stand behind. It said his work “elicits a kind of cultivated ‘ugh’ – it seems so simple, yet it works so well.” This ugh borders on the cathartic in the face of what Kamiel calls his beauties, works decidedly pretty, almost endearingly so.
The studio photographs are studio photographs in the literal sense, for the sake of it. The green screen in these same studio photographs is a green screen in the literal sense, for the sake it.
Can’t top tautology, really.
Kamiel has a thing for vases. This not only indicates a certain kind of ambition (it’s rather hard to imagine vaseless interiors), but it also betrays that latent longing for beauty (the vase’s primary alibi for being, you could say, because like art they’re mostly unnecessary and as art plain futile). Kamiel’s vases – and especially when established on extra-modular office furniture – love to confuse the gatekept line between ‘considered placement’ and ‘curated installation.’ They dissolve all pretense there’s an actual difference there, knowing well that at this point there’s careers and egos at stake. (And what it all comes down to is taste, which is – for Kamiel knows a coin flips for less – always accompanied by its negative.) Whether vases in 3D or chinoiserie, whether real or reproduced, Kamiel can’t remain impartial to the shape’s ability to seduce, he’s himself seduced by it – clearly. Vases here are things you look up to, they turn to towers. They have that forever flair that skyscrapers have, the swag of being able to go on endless – at the end of the day their levels are only limited because, Why would you show off?
Kamiel has a thing for design & dogs. (Kamiel has a thing for things). There must be, beyond alliteration, some kind of analogy between a popped Champagne bottle peek-a-booing from a questionably-Prada Prada bag and a faux-porcelain dog chilling in a cardboard box that might as well be convincing as a winged altarpiece.
There must be…
-Nikolaas Verstraeten
