Pieter Vermeersch

Carl Freedman Gallery is delighted to present Pieter Vermeersch’s second solo exhibition at the gallery and also a major off-site project at the Londonewcastle Project Space.

Untitled (0-100% Blue) is simple in concept – a hand painted gradation from 0-100% of a colour, from white to a colour known as Basic Blue (the blue used as a base in the mixing of paints). Over such an expanse of space the gradation seems entirely seamless and any sense of physical mark making becomes imperceptible. The experience is of a colour coming into being, a temporal dimension that could be seen as analogous with development processes in photography, rather like observing a photograph of blue appear in a Poloroid. As analytical (abstract) as this work may be, in a sense it is also representational of atmospheric perspective, i.e. the perspective made by light where the visual reality in front of us gets more and more blue-ish with distance, as witnessed in particular in historical painting from the 15th century on.

For his solo show at the Carl Freedman Gallery, Vermeersch will present a new series of works on canvas. These paintings are meticulous copies of photographs of skies. The photographs are taken at either sunset or sunrise, and in particular at that moment when the sun has already disappeared or is yet to appear. Vermeersch makes a change to the photographs before painting them. He inverts them – either physically, i.e. turns them through 180” so they are upside down, or he prints the photograph in its negative form so the colours and light and dark are in reverse. Using techniques similar to those employed by Photorealist painters, Vermeersch then makes exacting copies of these inverted photographs. The end results are not just exercises in verisimilitude as the distancing device of inverting the photographs makes it difficult to fix the idea that these are somehow images of skies, of something real. The same elements are present in the paintings – colour and light and space – but what has been painted is somehow a new kind of image: one that is neither abstract nor representative but both at the same time.

Pieter Vermeersch is one of Belgium’s leading artists. He has shown extensively in private and public galleries both in Belgium and internationally. His last exhibition in London was South London Gallery’s Beyond These Walls (2009), In 2007 he was recipient of Jonge Belgische Schilderkunst (Young Belgian Painting Prize). In 2010 he curated an exhibition at Flemish parliament of work by three generations of the Vermeersch family and was recipient of the Art Brussels ING commission.