Artist: Yannick Val Gesto
Exhibition title: Booming
Venue: CINNNAMON, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Date: November 28, 2015 – January 9, 2016
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and CINNNAMON, Rotterdam
‘Deliberately naive’ is also a phrase that is applicable to the work of Yannick Val Gesto. His work is an expression of a fast paced world of cyber culture and internet memes, but his prints also give away a longing for in-the-worldness that parallels Rachel de Joode’s.
Delving into a wealth of images to be found on the web, Val Gesto cleverly cuts and pastes his source material into intricate works that have a surprisingly painterly quality. Drawing from online subcultures to be found in gaming, manga forums, etc, Val Gesto is specifically intrigued by the amateur aesthetics of ‘fan art’ that people put online. Val Gesto appropriates and reworks this footage into complex, layered images. Lines, patterns and scribbles are added, seemingly at random and deliberately clumsy, but for the trained eye it is clear that these works are minutely composed and genuinely skillful.
For this exhibition at CINNNAMON Val Gesto has created and installation with mural drawings, prints, and a found footage video, allowing the viewer to be physically present in the otherwise virtual realm of his work. Scanning the room and zooming in on the details it becomes clear that Val Gesto’s over-anxious virtual universe entails its own negation: we can read feel good quotes like “Wii are one” and “stay positive” on the works and the walls, a relaxing found footage video of a rainy rain forest plays in the background.
Yannick Val Gesto (Belgium, 1987) studied graphic design and visual arts at St Lucas Academy in Antwerp. He lives and works in Antwerp. Booming is Val Gesto’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands.
Previously exhibitions include: Soul Hackers – with Kate Steciw, Lvey Delval, Brussels (2015); Close Both Eyes To See, Obsolete Studio, Brussels (solo, 2015); Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, The Stable, Waregem (2015); V.I.P., Hole of The Fox, Antwerp (2014); Soft Intensities, Gloria Knight Gallery, Auckland (2014); The New Beauty of Our Modern Life, Higher Pictures, New York (2014); Bad Gateway, Elaine Levy Project, Brussels (2013)
