Artist: Vincent Geyskens
Exhibition title: The Spam of Control
Venue: trampoline, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: November 5 – 26, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and trampoline
Loose excerpts: chosen pieces.
(…) Is Vincent Geyskens the new Dr. Jekyll? In society he is a good husband and father, but in the loneliness of his studio he devours images, consumes fresh and foul meat, open wounds and artistic garbage, and spits out collages of erotic and pornographic images, reproductions of works from the past and fragments of his own works.
(…) The work of Geyskens questions the position of the image and its accessibility in Western society. If banality disarms and abundance neutralizes, then banishment implies valorization. L’origine du monde is no longer hidden behind curtains, eroticism seems to have aged and pornography is omnipresent.
(…) Lydia, Virgina, Caroline, Elisa, Emmy, Gina, Miranda, Sylvia, Vera, Véronique, Barbara, Gisèle, Nadya, Patricia, Maureen, Rose, Shana, Kelly, Anita, Pamela, Kyoko, Lindsay, Jenna. From here on: Agrippina, Drusilla and Gertrude. If painting is a crime, Vincent Geyskens’ list of victims gets longer every year.
(…) There will be a day that art lovers and researchers will open Pandora’s box of Geyskens’ relations with his Christian education and culture.
(…) One can be tempted to attribute a moral value to the work of Vincent Geyskens, to position it in the important series of realists, from Courbet to Beuys, over Grosz and Dix. They politicize the individual again, fully enjoying he execution of the work, but remaining conscious of the impact of their attitude on the psyche of the spectator.
(…) Every work of Vincent Geyskens proves it is possible to relate to the world without mediator. It invites you to put technological gadgets aside.
(…) Images can never be trusted. Vincent Geyskens is very well aware of this and continuously takes pleasure, like Parrhasius, in contradicting the gaze of the spectator.
(…) In 1999 Geyskens sketched the outlines of the context in which his work is created (A-Prior nr.1). Afterwards he became the interpreterof his visual production : he hand the keys to analyze it (painting as a zombie, the painted surface as skin, the relation of the fascist thought to notion as ‘dry’ and ‘wet’, etc.)
(…) Geyskens finds his references in the most diverse periods (i.e., Prehistory, the Roman Empire, the Third Reich, today) and he shows most vulgar phenomena: withdrawal, provincialism or racism.
(…) Vincent Geyskens constantly takes on an iconoclastic battle in his images.
(…) As the cartridges empty and the print gets dirty or loses it sharpness, the images change. Every printing defect means a return to physical reality, the proof of a unique existence resulting from an accident, comparable to the brush stroke on the canvas.
(…) Two essential criteria of Geyskens’ painterly practice are the fact that he refuses to obey to the rules of explicit communication, and that he deliberately distances himself from repetition.
[…]
–Simon Delobel, November 2016
