Artists: Sindy (Elke Van Kerckvoorde and Dieter Durinck)
Exhibition title: Blijf Deze Nacht
Venue: Loods 12, Wetteren, Belgium
Date: October 11 – November 8, 2015
Photography: Matthew Kneebone, images courtesy of the artists and Loods 12
Sindy is an ongoing communal practice by Elke Van Kerckvoorde and Dieter Durinck that started in 2014 after noticing many similar strategies in their work. Both often take existing graphic elements from signage and packaging as starting point for their paintings. Their collaborative work encompasses painting, screenprinting, drawing, collages and publications.
The exhibition Blijf Deze Nacht takes its title from a classic Flemish love song by Salim Seghers. The poetic and romantic nature of this song title creates a juxtaposition with the abstract formal language applied throughout the works,
which are also comprised of found imagery coming from various sources like construction company’s advertising panels, 80’s decorative elements from bicycles, truck stickering,…collected mostly through Iphone pictures. Through using common, aesthetically unspectacular found imagery and materials as starting point for their work they try to investigate the shifting liquidity happening in-between different media and their transformative possibilities.The found images were digitally reworked in Photoshop, removing text elements and creating new compositions through repetition and rescaling. Certain other graphical elements like shape/color are being reinforced in this way and they become more distanced from their original context. By appropriating all these banal everyday non-esthetical images as formal source material aspects like corporate identity, recognisibility, mass reproducibility and communicative possibilities are being questioned in an indirect, formal way. At the same time many classic painterly aspects like form, color, depth, texture and composition are getting examined in the process, anachronistically referencing abstract painting’s history.
