top of page
Capture d’écran 2024-10-15 à 15.37.37.png
Capture d’écran 2024-10-15 à 15.36.52.png

STAN VAN STEENDAM

1985, Belgium

Belgium

Lives and works: Brussels and Lisbon

+

Works  __  Website  __  Instagram

Info

Travelling along uncontaminated paths in a natural background, through hot dry desert landscapes, coming across narrow, impervious, hidden and secret paths, traced by the perpetual flow of men and animals: this is the origin of the essence of Down the trail, by Stan Van Steendam (1985), the Belgian artist’s second solo exhibition in the gallery.

According to this perceptual experience, which is characterised by a powerful meditative dimension, we often find ourselves in the condition of having to select the stimuli at which we pay attention. This process can only take place if we use the different sensory inputs available to us (such as the auditory, visual, etc.), in relation to the different sensory features typical of the stimulus, namely: position, colour, shape, transparency, shade, segment and so forth.

Stan Van Steendam’s enigmatic, iconic and visceral work challenges all our ideas, all the established notions of both tradition and modernity. The results are delicate sculptural virtuosity and gentle monochromatic investigations. His work, of an intuitive nature, aims to deconstruct the materiality of painting that he explores through an extensive process of layering raw pigments, plaster and epoxy resin on wood in addition to other materials such as ash, dirt and dust. It creates a new idea of the pictorial tradition, which definitely enables new perceptual experiences. All these materials lend a liberating approach to his practice as they themselves arbitrarily choose a self-moulding direction of both form and colour variation. Down the trail emphasises a broader concept of the sculptural work, moving towards an idea of total experience.

Van Steendam currently lives between Brussels and Lisbon. Lisbon has particularly influenced his work over the last two years, especially because of the dystopian and desert-like atmosphere of the industrial area where he lives, called Barreiro.

His minimalist compositions are highly intuitive, material and tactile, reflecting a propensity for meditation that certainly requires a state of absolute calm. Enormous monochromatic, iridescent, luminous and vibrant paintings, extending into space, question, as already mentioned, the definitions of all traditional categories. Since Van Steendam’s research is based on the material construction of the surface, it has to be understood as a process that is both physical and meditative, in which the only creative instrument used by the artist himself is his bare hands. Moreover, the resulting tumultuous perception, in perfect balance between mystery and ambiguity, continues to change according to the reflection of both light and cerulean skies on the same material surface.

In this latest cycle of works, through thorough recuperation activities, the materials unquestionably constitute that primary path which constantly insinuates itself into the creative process, passing with agility from one painting to another, establishing its trueessence. Through our senses and the perceptive experiences that the senses trigger in us, we can hopefully become aware of the world that surrounds us to the extent that we are able to understand its fundamental aspects. The perceptual experience in which Van Steendam invites us to participate is intended as a primary source of knowledge of the world, which is interpreted as an environment. It is a phenomenon that is as familiar from the point of view of our immediate consciousness as it is enigmatic from the point of view of reflection on the transcendental.

DOMENICO DE CHIRICO, 2022

Arid is an exhibition by Stan Van Steendam (Belgium, 1985) that features three works that occupy the gallery walls and establish a dialogue around a place of transition. Overlapping density and rarefaction, vibration and contain- ment, the open and the hidden, Van Steendam inquires about the constitution of painting in an operation that takes place between the body of an object and its pictorial surface.

Exploring a logic of deposition in which the materials’ nature, context, and work produce their inherent im­tages and shapes, the pieces are made horizontally, on a worktable, close to the artist’s body. On a wooden base that stands as a starting point, Van Steendam applies pigment, plaster and dust collected from his studio’s surroundings. In this process, time and gravity create a logic of strata, which expresses both chance and choice, that marks a path that is made between composition and happening.

The larger work, Cane (2022), is a painting / object of an environmental and contemplative nature that demarcates a centre and a surrounding halo. Asking for the viewer’s attention, the work expresses a hot, dry and pale existence, subtly revealing the fingers and gestures that gave it form. Breathing colour, the shapes within shift and change as they follow its underlying geometry. The closeness it asks for and its intrinsic workmanship emanate a slow time that summons a connection that pleads for a growing availability. Affirming its presence in the gravity well of the viewer’s gaze, the work inhabits an intermediate space between what is hidden and what is revealed, what calls for us and what goes away.

The other two works in the exhibition, Saunter (2022) and Peer (2022), take on a rectangular shape that we quickly associate with the world of painting. In them, the main surface is coated with a layer of epoxy resin that seals it with a homogeneous texture. Contrary to the previous example, the expression on the sides takes on greater intensity here, revealing the work process and its specificities. Saunter and Peer can be read as a sequence of steps, with dialogic tops; a crease and a groove. In both cases, when the resin closes the composition, the gloss seals the base, reflects our gaze and allows for a faster, but more distant, appropriation.

In these three works, whether in the lateral thickness of their layers, in the stains and lines on their surfaces, in the glossiness that redirects our gaze back to us, or in the quietness that invites deeper examination, the articulation of the forms produces an unstable and elusive apprehension. Each part reorganizes (itself in) the constitution of the whole, between what is hidden and what is suggested, between the mask and the explanation. In this way, Van Steendam investigates an emphatic intermediate state, difficult to circumscribe, somewhere between purpose and effect, dwelling on an entity set between will and consequence, between its body and its surface.

The management of this delicate balance is the result of a state in which the nature of the elements and the artist’s presence coincide in the wholeness of the work. In this sense, these pieces are the consequence of their intrinsic physical dimension, but also of the artist’s intuition, and his meditative process. A kind of mutual ambience: interior and exterior, intense and arid, like the inebriant light of the morning.

SÉRGIO FAZENDA RODRIGUES, 2022

CV

Solo and Duo
Exhibition

Group Exhibition

Award - Residency

2024         

_Thoroughfare, Carvalho Park, New York (USA)

2023        

_Paris, Texas, duo show with Bobby Dowler, Barbé, Ghent (BE)

2022       

_Traces, Jacob Bjorn Gallery, Aarhus (DK)

 _Arid, Uma Lulik, Lisbon (PT)

_Down the Trail, Barbé Urbain, Ghent (BE)

2021          

_Saunter, Bjorn & Gundorph Gallery, Aarhus (DK)

 _De/Construction, duo show with Sarah Loibl, G/ART/EN, Como (IT)

_Dust Road, Galería Nordés, Santiago de Compostela (ES)

2020        

_Lá de além, Bjorn & Gundorph Gallery, Aarhus (DK) 

_Palazzo Monti in collaboration with Sunday-S gallery and Bjorn & Gundorph Gallery, Brescia (IT)

2019

_Lagoas, Archiraar, Brussels (BE) 

2018        

 _I’ve never built anything on new land, Barbé Urbain, Ghent (BE)

_New Works, Asphodel, New York (USA) 

 _Cinzento, Archiraar, Brussels (BE)

2024        

_Clipper Cuts, artist run project in a private apartment, group show with Bobby Dowler, _Vincenzo Schillaci and Michael Lombardo, Brussels (BE)

 _What Abstract Art Means to Me, group show with e.g. Kes Richardson, Lawrence Calver, Guillermo Pfaff, Daniel Jensen, Alzueta gallery, Barcelona (ES)

2023        

_In Medias Res, Barbé, Ghent (BE)

2022       

_Everybody Has a Plan Until they get punched in The Mouth, Barbé Urbain, Ghent (BE)

2021          

_visible invisible, group show with Philipp Modersohn, Manuel Burgener, curated by _Domenico de Chirico, Barbé Urbain, Ghent (BE)

_Staycation, Barbé Urbain, Ghent (BE)

2019          

_Summer Group Show including works from Private collections, Sunday-S Gallery, Copenhagen (DK) 

_ZWRT, Barbé Urbain, Ghent (BE)

2018          

_The future has no presence, Asphodel, New York (USA)

2017         

_Aspetti di superficie, Theca Gallery, Milan (IT)

_Panach’, D’apostrof, Meigem (BE) 

2024       

_ Fondation CAB, Brussels (BE)

2023        

_Marfa, Texas (USA)

2021          

_Valke Vleug, Puurs (BE)

2019        

_Palazzo Monti, Brescia (IT)

2017        

_Cripta747, Torino (IT)

2016          

_Syntax, Lisbon (PT)

2015          

_Prainha, Pico (PT)

Publications

2023

_parallel, with an essay by Eugene Binder, published by Barbé gallery and Stan Van Steendam

2021 

_Dust Road, artist book

2020_

além, with an essay by Alex Bacon, published by the artist

2020

_AKT magazine issue 3, with a text by Laura Bonne

2018

_consistenti meditazioni, text by Stefano Roberto Mazzatorta for exhibition catalogue chiarificazione

2016

_Dubuisson en Van Steedam, COLLECT AAA april, Ghent (BE)

Works

Works
Ancre 1
bottom of page