Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Sin título [Untitled]

Image caption
PIETER VERMEERSCH

Sin título [Untitled]

  • 2014
  • Oil on canvas
  • 230 x 170 cm
  • Cat. P_798
  • Acquired in 2014
By:
Carlos Martín

The Banco de España Collection has two pieces by Pieter Vermeersch, a Belgian artist who has stood out in recent decades for his approach to the language of abstraction from the twofold perspective of the tradition of Baroque Enlightenment and the legacy of photography in its most absolute form: that of capturing light and its gradation effects on the paper in formats such as Polaroid. Both works reflect one of Vermeersch’s most significant hallmarks, which is his subtle gradating of fields of colour. The transition of light is interrupted by a series of ‘chapters’, ranged discontinuously from the lightest to the darkest in the polyptych Painting # 24 (2007), and Untitled(2014), a larger, more recent work, features a similar modulation within a single colour, in this case pink, but in a single composition designed to be read vertically. The degree of perfection in the execution of that chromatic gradation gives the images the quality of a printed photograph. However, it is the outcome of a bottom-down analytical process that is purely pictorial and rather mechanical, which Vermeersch usually produces in a single day, so that even the activity of his body is set, like the change of light, by the circadian rhythm that causes fluctuations in the organism with the passing of the hours and the natural cycle of atmospheric changes.

Carlos Martín

 
By:
Beatriz Herráez
Pieter Vermeersch
Kortrijk 1973

Pieter Vermeersch studied at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the Higher Institute for Visual Arts in Ghent, and his first group exhibitions were held in the mid-1990s.

The dispassionate, impersonal reproduction of the image in painting has been a persistent feature in Pieter Vermeersch’s work. Attempts to transcribe an abstract image with a mechanical, calculated precision, where ‘the more systematically you try to erase spontaneity from the image, the more tenaciously it manifests itself,” to quote the artist from an interview with the critic Dieter Roelstraete.

 ‘Exact reproduction is not only unlivable, it is simply impossible’, points out Vermeersch in the same conversation. The necessarily fictitious, erratic nature of that operation, and the impossibility of faithfully reproducing a pictorial image are the rationale of that ‘new objectivity’ contained in the author’s output. Vermeersch addresses the issue of the demystification of the experience of art and its relationship with industrial production, and of the image from his knowledge of the philosophy of the image and his most controversial theses, disputed by critical theorists.

Solo shows of Pieter Vermeersch’s work have been held at the Blueproject Foundation (Barcelona, 2016); the Perrotin Gallery (Hong Kong, 2015); the Greta Meert Gallery (Brussels, 2015); the Carl Freedman Gallery (London, 2014); Projecte SD (Barcelona, 2013); the Elisa Platteau & Cie Gallery (Brussels, 2012); and the Londonewcastle Project Space (London, 2011). His pieces have been included in group exhibitions at the Antwerp Contemporary Art Museum (2003); the Institut d’art contemporain (Villeurbanne, France, 2016); the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Ghent, Belgium 2011); the Brussels Centre of Fine Arts (2007); and Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg, 2011).

Beatriz Herráez

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.