Narcisse Tordoir at Tick Tack

Artist: Narcisse Tordoir

Exhibition title: People

Venue: Tick Tack, Antwerp, Belgium

Date: May 14 – July 3, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Tick Tack, Antwerp

For the solo exhibition PEOPLE at TICK TACK, Narcisse Tordoir (Mechelen, 1954) will present a new body of work consisting of both in-situ and stand-alone pieces. In addition, a public artwork, in collaboration with Yvon Tordoir, will be unveiled in the heart of Antwerp as part of this presentation.

Narcisse Tordoir (Mechelen, 1954) is a visual artist who lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. He works with various media, ranging from drawings, prints and paintings to photography and installations. Through this, seemingly effortless, versatility, Tordoir digs into historical references to painting, while at the same time placing himself outside of the medium. With an explicit focus on the act of perception, his well thought-out and complex image montages challenge the intersections between romanticism and reality, between history and current affairs.

Tordoir’s practice spans over four decades with exhibitions at Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels; Venice Biennial, Belgian Pavilion; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; Centraal Museum, Utrecht; M HKA, Antwerp; Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels; Museum Plantin Moretus, Antwerp; CC Strombeek; SMAK, Ghent; Roger Raveel Museum and Emergent, Veurne.

Tordoir’s works are included in museum collections such as M HKA, Antwerp; Mu. ZEE, Ostend; SMAK, Ghent; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo and Centraal Museum, Utrecht.

***

One might begin, in preparing to assemble a text on the highly evolutionary work of Belgian artist Narcisse Tordoir (born in 1954), which spans over four decades, by stating a word which sets the tone, the key term that unravels self-generative paths and simultaneous weaves: the word “flow”. By observing Narcisse Tordoir’s complex work as a whole, we are confronted with a flooding river that tremendously runs. At times slowing down to meet other influxes and new elements, and then retreating, changing direction, opening up unusual paths, each time welcoming new and increasingly articulated ways of expression, as well as atypical iconographic entities. Far from creating futile tangles, fluidly, they manage to dance together in an aesthetic rhythm that takes the word to the word and decants not the pure form, but the image in all its historical complexity scrutinised and sniffed from the moment of its very formation, and then questioned from an ontological point of view until reaching the bustle of meanings that the modern world has assigned to it. Tordoir is certainly known for having broken pre-existing models, mainly his own; his productive ardour is punctuated by methodological deaths and rebirths that stimulate the internal energy of his research, always spurring new impulses of renewal. This is how his polyphonic choreographies, in which the chromatic language enters an intimate conversation with the abstract form, while the vaguely figurative elements filter current events through the remnants of representations belonging to various cultural spheres, are born. The group of works Z.T., among others, developed between 2019 and 2020 and presented in the exhibition, seem to make up a further evolutionary step in the artist’s prolific production. Indeed, compared to the early works in which fields of pure colour, geometry and enigmatic signs interacted, and to later works characterised by the collage technique, in which fragments were stacked one on top of the other and in which no hierarchy distinguished the abstract compositions from the colour fields, the spatial supports from the cut-out images, we can now observe a more mature methodological result, in which everything appears decidedly more relaxed, where colour has already shouted out its value amidst the intricacies full of hermeneutic references and each element, though vivid, carves out its own moment in the crowd: People.

Text by Domenico de Chirico
Translated from Italian by Colombe Fassin

Narcisse Tordoir, People, 2021, exhibition view, Tick Tack, Antwerp

Narcisse Tordoir, Z.T., 2020, acrylic on wood, digital print, screenprint, lacquer, plexi glass, postal card, 110x200x28cm

Narcisse Tordoir, Z.T., 2020, acrylic on wood, digital print, screenprint, spray paint, stainless steel, plexi, acrylic on wall, 60x165x7cm (black and white planes of variable dimensions)