Stijn Cole _ POV

      Landscape, when it serves as the starting point of a creative concept, proves to be a generous subject matter, revealing a peculiar dynamic between the depicted place and a person situated within it. It’s one of the few instances in which an artist, an observer, faces such an all-encompassing force that they have no other choice but to become the tool of composition and comprehension itself. This comes in the form of the timing and positioning of their own physical presence. In such circumstances, a landscape should not be understood as nature itself, but as a situated perspective, a partial revelation conditioned by a viewpoint.

Time passes, change unfolds, and all life continues even without an audience.  Elements that seem to withstand centuries’ worth of transformation coexist with the circumstances of their surroundings, creating an alliance that manifests in endless variations of familiar spectacles. The effects of entropy are accumulated in the angles and shades of light, seasons passing, and other factors of nature, all of which contribute to the ever-changing facade of places that remain identifiable.

Any person, artist or not, who commits to capturing such conditions must establish a dialogue with nature as a subject, revealing subtle resistance and tension. The beholder, as the active participant, acts through decisions, placement and patience, while the landscape stands its ground and responds only through its monetary appearance in absolute truthfulness.

Photography as a medium seems to heighten the impression of these specific qualities of landscapes. The invariables shift the focus over to the conscious decisions of the person handling the camera: more specifically, the timing and positioning. These two planes of reality become the tools of making one’s presence known. A special kind of presence that dilutes identity.

The exhibition’s namesake work, titled POV (Point of View), is a selection of images that were not taken by Cole, but were found by him. Presumably from the 1980s, the collection of old dia photographs depicts landscapes across mainly France and Belgium, locations that the artist also frequently visited; hence why he was able to identify them. Recognition thus becomes an encounter across time rather than an act of authorship. A special emotional connection that stems from the memories of the past is being shown through the eyes of an unknown stranger, years apart.

There is an additional gesture on Cole’s part that can be interpreted as a collaborative effort with the mystery present in the backstory: an added filter that increasingly blurs the sequence of images when seen up close. Cole applied this effect with varying intensity as an indirect instruction, gently manoeuvring the observer’s path to aid in seeing the bigger picture. The images, as they run around the walls of Ontsteking, provide the opportunity to witness all of nature’s constant changes through their most elemental characteristics only. The sum of lights, colours, and textures is reduced to a grid of alternating cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

Fragmenting sceneries into elements of technical minimalism is a recurring creative method that takes various forms throughout the exhibition. The artwork Fisterra consists of a systematic arrangement of colours based on three viewing directions at the same moment across the sea from the cliffs of Fisterra, Spain; the end of the world. The selected colours are such universal markers of natural elements that they trigger the feeling of recognition on an instinctual level. The audience might not know at first glance which landmark provides the shades, but somehow similar personal impressions emerge.

A more direct evocation of memories takes form in Cole’s 1:1 sculptures, 2 of which are featured in the show. These works are exact casts of the rocky coastline from a small bay near Cancale, a town on the French seaside. Within the context of POV, this place gains significance through Cole’s personal ties to it, as he used to frequent this location with his family during his childhood.

Through the act of casting, ordinary fragments of the environment become imprints that carry personal and emotional meaning. Even simple details of a landscape can act as personal time capsules: holding memories, associations, and traces of shared presence.

The works selected for the exhibition all share this similar sentimental undertone; they become mementos of dear moments shared with loved ones, all depicted through universal elements, a declaration of one’s presence and shared experiences through documentation.

Hanna Julia Erdosi

«Mémoire – mes moires…», writes Michel Leiris in his book Langage tangage ou ce que les mots me disent;
emphasizing how unstable the faculty of memory is, as shifty as light reflections on a sea with an undefined horizon.
‘Souvenirs d’été’ is precisely the title Stijn Cole gave to his latest series of works, which he started creating when
him and his family chose to leave the village of Seloignes, near Chimay, to return to Ghent. One of these series, a
collection of photographs of isolated trees, which were taken in the spring while the vegetation regains its colors and
vitality, seem to be crossed in their middle by a vertical line. The artist exposed the left half of the image to summer
sunlight, while keeping the right half protected from it. As a result, the photograph seems to be made up of two
distinct time frames. One shows the immediacy of the captured pattern, while the other, altered by natural light, is
a consequence of the relentless passage of time. Together they look like an open book that documents a time cycle
and that summons the memory of fragile or tangible moments that are buried in both his and our memory.
Stijn Cole’s mastery lies in his ability to consistently strike a balance between very personal preoccupations and
common evocations that can be shared over and over again. If these modified tree pictures evoke very precise
memories in his own mind, like the stones he collected in the forests during his trip to Compostela with his
daughter, they are likely to remind those who look at them of some of their own experiences. What is more common
to human beings than the experience of time passing – whatever the form it might take? The philosopher and
scientist Alfred Korzybski claimed that the cumulation of time would even be a distinctive human feature. Regardless
of the assessment of this statement, the experience of duration and its expression through the means of art history
is a recurrent preoccupation for artists, and Stijn Cole is no exception.
A few years after settling in Seloignes, Stijn Cole had already paid tribute to another artist who formerly lived in
the area, Marthe Wéry (1930-2005). Inspired by a series which she created in 1976 for the upcoming Museum of
Contemporary Art of Ghent, Cole had taken, during the whole summer, a photograph every minute between 5 pm
and midnight. Each photograph is thus composed of a succession of vertical lines which, in a Western reading order,
combine the luminous intensities of each hour until the darkness of the night. Continued in other locations, notably
La Panne, these Timescapes, as he calls them, rely once again on a subtle equilibrium, this time between a rigorous
conceptual protocol and a strong emotional sensitivity. The flow of time, materialized by the day-to-day variations of
light intensity, is paradoxically concretized in an image as still as it is fascinating.
It is the same sense of balance that struck me as prevalent in the Colorscapes painting series. These methodically
decompose landscape photographs into a chromatic spectrum. Fleeting moments are captured in specific locations.
The former are carefully broken down according to the various color shades that constitute them and the latter
are identified in the title or in some indications written on the canvases. The different shades are then transferred,
with the naked eye, to a grid (16×16 squares) traced on the canvas and arranged in a reading order, from lightest to
darkest. Applied with a brush, these pictorial gestures ostensibly embrace their tactile and sensual presence, while
enabling a landscape to be mentally reconstructed out of personal memories. The Colorscapes series are a synthesis
of an experience that can be both conceptual and retinal and create a singular midpoint between abstraction and
figuration.
The theme of the natural landscape (rural, mountain or maritime) is probably the one that best suits Stijn Cole’s
multidisciplinary practice. Whether it is «artialised», as the theorist Alain Roger suggests, or reproduced in one
way or another, the landscape always stems from a particular point of view. It is therefore both an individual and
social construction. And Stijn Cole likes to build and deconstruct! If the Colorscapes are the result of complex
deconstruction and reconstruction processes, Cole also likes to simplify his gesture: a blue horizontal plane over a
green plane evokes a composition that is usually attributed to landscapes. Sometimes, the synthesis is even more
radical: a monochrome is simply structured using two or three layers of varnish (matte, satin and/or glossy) and it
doesn’t take much more for one to perceive it as a landscape. In a subtle shift, the solid surfaces are transformed
into areas of unexpected depth, while the surface of the painting becomes a pictorial space flooded by the gaze.

If the landscape is the specter that haunts Stijn Cole’s abstract compositions, it is the horizon line that reveals it. This
imaginary line where the earth – or the sea – meets the sky is the landscape’s structuring element, even if it is reduced,
in the artist’s works, to a simple chromatic transition (light/dark), to the passage from one varnish to another, or even to
a simple fold in the photographic paper (a remarkable paradox in this case: it is the modernist assertion of a medium’s
materiality which restores its figurative agency). The horizon always organizes the space, modulates the luminous
intensities, and invites spatial reconstruction as well as subjective projection. As localized as it may be, by a title or
a geographical indication, the landscape surrenders itself and summons reminiscence, the activation of the memory
and the evocation of recollections. If the artist starts by questioning a key theme in art history and the specificities of
each of its mediums, he then imperceptibly drifts towards his own personal experience; not imposing on us, but rather
inviting us to add our own narrative.
If the artist is at ease with these various mediums, he is equally at home with drawing. His pencil drawings on paper
however differ from the rest of his work in their precision and swarming detail. They take on the precision of a survey
and convey a form of accuracy that could likely be described as ”documentary”, a term the artist associates with some
past lived experiences. The drawings articulate the space and steer the densities of light with the same intelligence as
with the paintings but through a different means: mimesis. If photography is the ultimate art of mimetic reproduction,
Cole alternatively sets emphasis on elements that attest to the material nature of a photography. His drawings on the
other hand take a similar approach, but without concern for colors. This explains why a chromatic scheme, a small
grid filled in with different color strokes, is sometimes added to them. Cole’s drawings then ideally take on as much
mimetic qualities as diegetic ones.
Whether painted or drawn, detailed, or reduced to its structural lines, the landscape remains a synecdoche. It is a part
evoking a whole which is in turn ungraspable in its totality. Caspar David Friedrich well understood this. Even when
Cole creates polyptychs to suggest changes in the viewer’s position, which also implies changes in light, he does not
deviate from this rule. Upon being invited to create a public sculpture for the Emil Van Doren Museum in Genk, Cole
carried out a bronze version of an idea he had previously and successfully developed: casting fragments of rocky
surfaces in several places (Brittany, South of France, etc.) to literally «imprint» each of the details shaping their surface.
Reproduced in bronze or resin, these impressions reproduce, on a limited surface, the roughness of the mountainous
ground, in the manner of a horizontal coring seizing a sample of earth’s crust. The precision of the replicated surface
seems then contradicted by the modesty of the portion given to see, even more notably when compared to what it
suggests. Although reduced to uneven surfaces, these works manage to condense a history that is not only geological,
as historical, ecological, artistic, or subjective stakes are also here layered.
The exhibition Souvenirs shows new developments in the artist’s three-dimensional works; new reminiscences added
to older ones, which further nourish a memory that never reaches a saturation point. An oak tree branch seems to grow
from a bronze tube, as if life managed to tear itself away from inert matter, as if time managed to tear itself away from
immobility, and as if memory tore itself away from oblivion. Further on, some marble pieces from Rance and Carrara are
cut in a rigorously straight line that can only result from human intervention. Aligned on the wall, keeping the cut at eye
level, the height of the anthropocentric point of view that Erwin Panofski has analyzed at length, the blocks draw a new
horizon, a new line where earth and sky meet. By their simple alignment, without any artifice other than the precision
of the cut and the rigor of their ordering, they draw unforeseen depths, open infinite perspectives, and promise worlds
waiting to be discovered: The worlds of Stijn Cole; the worlds he offers to share with us.

– Pierre-Olivier Rollin, writer, curator and director of the BPS22 museum

Stijn Cole has his first solo exhibition in Brussels, at Irène Laub: landscape ‘abstractions’ with an almost romantic evocative power.
We remember his bronzes installed by Yolande De Bontridder in the opulent garden of the Villa Carpentier in Ronse, but also more monumental exhibitions at the S.M.A.K. and the MSK in Ghent, not forgetting a presentation of multiples at the Villa Empain, or the last biennial in the Parc d’Enghien. Long established in Chimay, Stijn Cole (Ghent, 1978) is part of the most important institutional collections of contemporary art in Belgium, notably the Belfius collection, the BPS22, the Ixelles Museum and the Belgian Embassy in Washington.
For her first solo exhibition at Irène Laub, the artist has chosen to work under the sign of “Souvenirs”. All the works presented were inspired by the region of Chimay, where he lived for about ten years before returning to Ghent during the first confinement. While he was trying to visually capture specific moments in time, he realised that, in a global and direct way, he was also describing moments of his own life: “It’s like a shelf of personal memories linked to places he has been to, to specific moments”, he says. A personal approach that takes on a universal dimension through the analytical treatment Cole applies to these temporal fragments. “What is more common to human beings than the experience of time passing?” asks Pierre-Olivier Rollin, director of the BPS22, in the text accompanying the exhibition: “The experience of duration and its expression through the means of art history are a recurring preoccupation of artists, and Stijn Cole is no exception. Better still, the Ghent artist makes it the common thread of a research that is both conceptual and romantic: objective, documented, scientific, but also incredibly emotional and poetic.
His multidisciplinary practice revolves around the relationship between the subject and its environment. Through a process that combines traditional artistic disciplines with digital manipulation techniques, Cole seeks to represent the variations that time and light impose on a selected section of a landscape. So it is with these blocks of Rance or Carrara marble gleaned over time, shaped by the artist to retain an impression of the landscape: a single gesture – cutting cleanly and polishing one side of the block – transforms it into a landscape, creating a skyline for our eyes. The tracks are blurred, the block is seen in all its raw minerality. Two recent sculptures made of bronze stanchions to which a branch of a tree – oak or hornbeam – is grafted, give the measure of the space and make these works the trace of a wandering in the forest. But the artist does not allow himself to be pigeonholed: he seizes all media with talent, deploys series that are both contrasting and complementary, and renews himself while digging the same tireless furrow that offers the astonished public a different reading of the landscape. “I’m not a painter, what interests me is the search for colours, the way they blend and the tactile dimension”, says the man in front of two large abstract paintings – a seascape and a forest landscape – from which he has extracted the colour chart to give a different composition: a grid of shades that could be mistaken for pixels.
MARKING THE HORIZON WITH THE FOLD
How to preserve a trace of the landscape in the most abstract way possible?With great subtlety, Stijn Cole answers this question with ‘paintings’ varnished by a car factory, where matt and satin shades reveal the quintessence of the memory. The photograph of a solitary tree, only half of which has been exposed to the sun during a summer, shows a natural discolouration, as if the work contained two distinct temporal sections. Another example is a photograph taken in the fog: the ‘natural’ horizon has disappeared, but Cole replaces it artificially with the fold of the paper, giving the viewer a different impression depending on the light, natural or artificial, and the moment. “He makes abstractions out of landscapes,” marvels the gallery owner: “Whereas here nature itself imposes an abstraction on the eye, the artist makes us feel the landscape. The horizon contributes to the fact that, even in the face of abstract lines or squares of colour, one can still situate oneself in the space.
Blurring the lines, the man plays with his label of contemporary Caspar David Friedrich and remains surprising as well as elusive.

Le soir 12/1/2022

Belgian artist Stijn Cole draws inspiration from

the environment to express concepts like time,

perception, light and color, and how people see

and experience reality. In his works Cole employs

a wide range of mediums, combining abstract and

figurative media to produce a cohesive whole in

which content and form complement one another,

demonstrating a profoundly creative understanding

of the world around us.

Stijn Cole’s art explores the relationship between

colors and forms and how they are perceived in

different light and temporal conditions. As a result,

he has developed his own creative techniques,

committing to a variety of genres and forms.

It doesn’t matter whether he’s working in two or

three dimensions, in color or monochrome, on

film or digital, Cole is a multidisciplinary artist who

paints, sketches, photographs, prints, sculpts, and

produces installations. In his work, he often focuses

on a specific environment, such as a mountain

range, a section of the ocean, the sky or the horizon

motif; he is conscious that time and light impact the

landscape, and the viewer’s location determines

the appearance of the work. His recurring motifs,

including the horizon, are employed as a subjective

measure of our seeing. The scenery is not the point

for Cole, rather, he wants to immerse us in it and

change our perspective and perception.

Stijn Cole’s art revolves on the relationship between

the subject and the environment around it, It’s the

intensity of the light that counts here, not the kind

of material used, since how we perceive color and

shape is heavily influenced by it.

His installations and other projects continuously

draw on this body of knowledge, he strives to

capture just the essence of his subjects. In his

work, the ideas of time and landscape painting

have a revitalized beauty, resulting in a modern

impressionism – the artist’s work is often tied to

a certain time period, a walk, or travel and has a

documentary feel to it.

Cole sees his contribution as minimal, consisting

of nothing more than a lens through which he

views the world. While doing so, he subtly and

precisely calls on the audience to participate and

in this deceptive game, he tempts viewers into an

intense, spatial, and geometric encounter that will

continually surprise them, In fact, Stijn Cole’s most

recent works are increasingly taking the form of

installations, environments that he builds for the

public to explore.

ALICE ZUCCA:

Light is the most important mechanism by which the world reveals itself

to our eye, you very much take this into account in your research. What

fascinates you about this aspect in general and in relation to the theme of

the landscape?

STIJN COLE:

The very first work I made after graduating was a timeline on which you

could read the light intensity of a day from left to right. I was fascinated

by the conceptual photography of Jan Dibbets and the works of Stanley

Brouwn, and at the time was looking for ways to capture a period of time

in a two-dimensional image. It is from this same search that several works

have emerged since then. The time aspect that becomes visible in an image

because of the evolution of the light condition on a subject, became the

subject of my first landscapes. Where in the first works I pointed my camera

(obscura) at the sky, I tilted it downwards bringing a horizon into view. This

subjective line that corresponds to your eye level, and by extension the

position of yourself in relation to a subject, determines, together with the

light condition of the moment, how you see the environment/objects. My

works are about looking and continuing to look. At first I limited myself to

an abstract language of forms, afterwards the depiction of the landscape

was added. I see the landscape as an inexhaustible carrier of images and

stories on which I can hang my ideas, moreover it is a subject that appeals

to everyone.

AZ:

One of the elements that fascinates me the most in your work is when a

minimalistic digital “reduction to a minimum” occurs which, however, is

almost immediately able to recompose itself on a mental level in the eye

of the observer as a totalizing image that is suggested by the minimal

component. There is a moment in which the “object”, the landscape,

becomes subjective and universal at the same time and therefore it is

recognizable through the shapes, the concept of horizon, the color, the

light just as we mentioned and while they’re not representing the “object”

in a realistic sense they tell us about the Real. Can you tell me about this

process through your works?

SC:

This process sometimes overwhelms me as well; I suspect you’re referring

here mainly to my “Colorcapes”. In those works I start from a landscape

photograph and abstract it by listing the colors present in the image in a

grid of 16×16 squares from light to dark. The often lighter colors of the sky

are situated at the top of the image, the more earthy ones at the bottom,

creating a kind of accidental horizon. I think this reaction is due to what I

also said above, everyone is addressed by the landscape and everyone

therefore has such baggage and frame of reference that viewers are able

to see through the abstract image. A viewer already knows the ingredients

of my works, they are just presented in a different order in my abstract

works. When people see my colorscapes they spontaneously start telling

about the time that there was exactly the same light in their garden or

somewhere on vacation, they create at that moment a mental image of a

color sum that is actually very mathematically ordered and that is the result

of a photograph of a totally different moment in a totally different place.

AZ:

You are a multifaceted artist and you stretch from videos, installations,

models, paintings and mixed media. In this regard, I find very interesting the

use you make of painting, most of your works are conceived in the digital

field, where does the choice of the pictorial medium come from?

SC:

Over the years I have added more and more media and I try to purify each

medium to an essence, just as I do with the works themselves. The drawings

are one type of pencil on paper, the bronze sculptures are replicas of parts

of the landscape. The photographic works are more about the medium

of photography and the support rather than the image itself. Currently, I

often work a little less rigidly and sometimes stray further from that strict

schema. I started the paintings out of necessity, I was going crazy with the

constant repititive work at the computer to assemble the timelines.I had

the “Colorscapes” in my drawer as digital prints for some time but lacked a

certain sophistication in those images. For some reason the “Timescapes”

which are also just summations of colors didn’t lack that tactility. I found

it important to leave the grid visible where the different colors are listed

because otherwise the images tended too much towards pixelated images

and that was not my intention, perhaps that was the cause. Suddenly the

idea came to me to make the colors physical with paint. I searched on top

of the prints for the exact colors in oil paint. It is the traces of the underlying

attempts, the imperfect colors, the stains that appear on the edges of

the paper that suddenly give life to those flat prints. I am using a kind of

essential painting that is all about mixing and arranging color on a support.

AZ:

Can you tell me about your vision regarding the “documentary”

component and the creative process of your work in relation to your

ongoing series of “souvenirs”?

SC:

I like to refer to my own work as documentary images because each work is

a cut-out of reality to which I actually make little change. Of course, I make

selections from the photos I take, but I don’t really do more than put them

through a certain filter. I notice that people often find this a denigrating

description; documentary is associated with everyday images from the

media that have to illustrate a story and that are merely “documentation”.

I look at it differently: the images I make are not intended to illustrate a

defined story, but they are all linked to my personal life, they are the results

of the moments I experienced. This ties in with the idea of souvenirs.

Souvenirs are objects that make a memory tangible. You bring them back

from a holiday and more than in the object, their personal value lies in the

memory of the moment you found them. When my family and I decided

to move back to the city after 10 years in the countryside, I made some

works that would capture the memory of our time in Chimay. During the

spring, I went looking for trees that were standing alone in the landscape,

photographed them and had those images developed on lambda paper.

On the first day of summer, I’ve put the images outside in the sun, half-

covered, and they stayed there all summer, leaving the uncovered half

bleached. I called this series “Souvenir d’été”. Since then, I have given each

work the title or subtitle “Souvenir” because I noticed that their meaning

for me was not in the making of the works or their presentation, but in the

memory of the moment when I saw the image and recorded it on camera

or in the search for stones in the forest, in the time I’ve spent with my

daughter on our trip to Compostela.

AZ:

Your work has an almost impressionistic component and it is linked to a

period in time, this is most visible in your minimalistic “timelines”.

The passage of time in the natural world, with all that it implies (changes

of lights, positions, changes of seasons, objects, subjects, etc.) is able to

define the shape of what we are faced with, but at the same time when we

interface with what is other than us, we are the creators and spectators of

what we are looking at as our imagination is an element that contributes to

the process of elaboration of the experience that we make of reality. The

landscape on the other hand is always in constant change by itself and you

seem to take all this into account since the element of the “movement” of

“change” is always present, and even when presented through your filter it

leaves room for more points of view possible (yours, that of the spectator,

the “natural” one). What is the message you intend to communicate? Can

you tell me about these works?

SC:

As I mentioned earlier, I first started to photograph the sky with a

motorized camera-obscura. For me, those images were not convincing

enough – there were all kinds of small errors and the transition needed to

get a positive image was too subjective for me, so I decided to make such

images digitally and in colour.

The result, I think, are images that can be viewed, as you say, in different

ways. These “Timescapes” are very mathematical, they are computer-

generated images, sums of colour in the visual language of statistics. You

can look at them from a purely aesthetic point of view, the way you look

at Sol Lewitt’s drawings, for the intriguing complexity of the summary of

colours they propose. Or you can approach them conceptually (Stanley

Brouwn style), with the idea of capturing a longer period in time through a

medium that is designed to capture the immediacy of a moment .

On another hand, the horizon creates a landscape through which the

images suddenly take on an emotional charge. You let go of the image

and project its colours onto your frame of reference. The shifting tones,

from grey to orange, to blue or black suddenly become a sunset; they

become last week’s sunset or a sunset you saw in Spain…. I like the work

of the impressionists because they stir up the same emotion. I think their

anchoring to the moment, the depiction of the now is very contemporary. A

new exhibition has just opened at Bozar in Brussels with David Hockney’s

i-pad paintings. Like the impressionists who first used oil paint in tubes, he

is – and I am as well – a child of his time who uses technology to achieve

his goal.

AZ:

Can you tell me more about the motif of the horizon and what it

represents for you?

SC:

In the very first works I made, there was no horizon visible yet – I

photographed the sky during certain periods of time. Philippe Van

Cauteren had just started as director of SMAK and he invited me

to create an exhibition for Kunstverein Ahlen in Germany. The space

was much too big for me, I didn’t have enough works, let alone works

with which I wanted to be seen. I painted an elementary landscape in

green-key and blue-key with the horizon at my eye level on one (32

meter long) wall of the room. The room was darkened, and 7 slide

projectors were used to project patches of light in the format of classic

landscape paintings from various museum collections on top of it.

The height of those patches was adjusted according to the position

of the horizon in each painting. In traditional presentations, paintings

are always hung with their middle at “eye level”, which usually varies

from 155 to 160 cm. I found that it became a problem when showing

landscapes with a visible infinite horizon and I adjusted the horizon of

all those landscapes to my own eye height. Since then, the horizon,

the subjective line that separates the visible from the invisible, has

been a motif that recurs in many of my works. My eye height is 158

cm, standing nicely in-between the standard 155 and 160 cm.

AZ:

Can you tell me about the work that was on display at the Corsini

botanical garden and its dialogue with space in the group show

ENDGAME?

SC:

In the exhibition Endgame I am showing 2 bronze sculptures entitled

“Cancale 1:1 #4” and “Cancale 1:1 #5 », as well as a photographic

sculpture called “Souvenir 2021”. Both could be seen as

documentary sculptures: the bronze works are replicas of parts of

the Breton coast and the photograph was taken in a nature reserve

in Ghent, the city where I live. The photographic image allows

me to place what appears at first sight to be an ordinary cutout

of a disordered Belgian landscape in the context of a Botanical

Garden. This inclusion adds some less appealing species to their

collection of carefully chosen Mediterranean plants. The picture is

mainly defined by the presence of wild nettles, an invasive species

that often supplants nature in Belgium because there is too much

nitrogen in the air. Other more fragile species are disappearing and

biodiversity is under threat. The monumental photographic image

(2 x 3 meters) consists of two parts connected by hinges that give

the image a spatial dimension and allow the light to fall on the work

in two different ways. Due to the aluminum surface of the print,

the colors from the environment are reflected in different ways on

the image. This gesture of the folding the image in two gives it a

structure, the overflowing cutout of nature becomes a land-scape.

The work stands on a table making it seem like an altar in its

surroundings.

AZ:

What are you working on at the moment?

SC:

Currently, after a Corona sabbatical year in which we moved and

renovated our new house and my studio, I am preparing 2 gallery

exhibitions. In January my first solo will open at Irène Laub Gallery

in Brussels and in September at the Mexico City based gallery

Hilario Galguera. The production for Brussels is in full progress,

the exhibition will be called “souvenirs” and I will show some new

paintings and sculptures in bronze, in Carrara marble and in Belgian

red marble. In February I am planning a road trip through Mexico.

As always, I have a list of projects in mind but the local landscape

will determine what the works will eventually look like. I am also

working on an architectural project for a neighborhood in Schoten

(Belgium) with the architect office Bart Dehaene. I have designed

a square and some facades, the delivery is only in a few years but

currently we are fine-tuning the brick pattern I designed.

This is an interview that was published in XIBT magazine (Nov 2021)

I

The landscape has played a very important role in the development of Western art and culture in general and of painting in particular. Through the painting of landscapes, artists have developed a better understanding of the artistic meaning of what they were doing.

This had led to the autonomy of art. Landscape imagery, landscape description, sequential philosophical reflections on the landscape and eventually the complete mapping of the world or – to use a word of cultural philosopher Ton Lemaire – the integral ‘publication’ of the whole of land and seas, it has all led to the (religious) emancipation and autonomy of man. We evolved from humans subordinate to nature into nature colonised by humans.

Landscapes emerge in Western painting roughly from the 14th century onwards. Initially as a background, for example in the medieval tidal books, gaining momentum with, for instance, Pieter Bruegel (1525-1569) until they become a full motif around the middle of the 19th century and are no longer subordinate to other content. At that time, artists get deeply involved in the visualisation of the landscape, which is how they gradually come to understand the status of their ‘image-ination’ of the landscape. Subsequently, they started making paintings that do not primarily portray that landscape or nature because of its representational value, but that came into being as an artistic creation parallel to nature. It is widely known that the painters of the Barbizon School, including Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867) and Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878), around the end of the first half of the 19th century and in the trail of William Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837), by being the first to paint ‘en plein air’, in the landscape, have played a crucial role in effecting the change from a representation of the landscape to an autonomous realisation of an artwork that still brings to mind an observed landscape, but of which the memory is no longer the major meaning of the work.

In 1855, Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) paints the imposing, realistic canvas, ‘L’Atelier du peintre. Allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (et morale)’ (359 x 598 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). The canvas presents a composite, constructed image of the artist’s studio, in which different scenes can be distinguished. The traditionally present female nude, for example, is not a passive object to be studied here. No, the woman – only barely covering her naked body from the gazes of the other attendees with a blanket – is standing behind the painter who works on the landscape that is on the centrally positioned easel. Courbet depicts himself as he finishes a landscape in the privacy of his studio – completely true to the historical facts. “From now on, the picture argues, it is the artist who creates the world rather than God.” (Barnes, p.77) Or, this painting is nothing less than an independence statement of art and artist of any custody.

At the same time, another technique is developed to render the perceived reality into an image that is ‘true to nature’. Photography takes on the representative function of painting slowly but surely. The camera that legitimises and mechanises the method of the (renaissance) perspective uncovers at the same time the hidden principle of the technique of perspective as perspectiveism: “[…] the idea that every point of view gives a relative truth about the world, and no position can be the absolute view. […] In Impressionism, and even in the Barbizon School, this particular kind of relativism that perspectiveism is, was already present, namely in the practice of some painters […] to show the same thing on the canvas at different times and from different points of view.” (Lemaire, p.53). Today, Stijn Cole relies precisely on photography to register the landscape and to come to autonomous works of art through interpretation and manipulation of that registration.

II

Stijn Cole is a paysagist in the best art historical sense of the word. He does not make land art, he is not a landscape architect, he does not impose any form on the land and – for that matter – neither on the sea. Cole visits landscapes, views of the land, and seascapes, views of the ever-moving sea. He records parts of it, mostly in digital, photographic images, but sometimes in mouldings as well, and transforms his registrations into autonomous, independent works of art: paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, objects and videos. Cole expresses himself only in images of landscapes and in images derived from landscapes. The strict limitation to landscapes that Cole imposes on himself seemingly effortlessly is in no way related to the versatility of the output that he distills from the observations of his monomaniac motif. All the parameters of the landscape are visually explored by Cole: the space that stretches to the horizon, the changing light that reveals or conceals the landscape and the time the landscape goes through in its eternal change. Landscapes immediately bring to mind the experience of time and space. Time and space are therefore obviously the most important factors in Coles imagination of the landscape. From the landscape, Cole derives his so-called Time- and Colorscapes, to name his two most important groups of work, as well as many other less categorisable but equally meaningful works.

Following an instruction by Dutch museum man Rudi Fuchs (Esman, p.25) we are looking for otherness in Stijn Cole’s oeuvre, for what we have not yet seen before or elsewhere. Often, we define that otherness as that which differs from works of art by other artists who have preceded Cole.

III

In his public conversation with Ann De Meester of 30 June 2017, organised by Mu.ZEE, Ostend, American artist Richard Tuttle (1941) emphasises how much he has been impressed by a small seascape of James Ensor (1860-1949). Tuttle, who apparently maintains the fairly consistent habit to follow and watch the sunset with his wife, understands in Ostend, seeing Ensor’s canvas ‘Marine’ (ca 1938, Mu.ZEE, Ostend) how the sunset in “Ensor’s Marine is a spatial experience and not a temporal experience”. Tuttle’s reading of Ensor’s canvas opens the eyes. The painting is indeed not a realistic representation of a setting sun and all its romantic and aesthetic delights. Ensor knows how to render a sunset as the spatial event that it actually is (the earth turns us away from the sun, so that we gradually lose sight of that sun) in a composition that is almost entirely based on a horizontal stratification of strips of light and colour, of red, white, blue, green and ochre. This abstract composition of horizontal strokes of colour would be difficult to interpret as a sea view at sunset if it weren’t for the small, slightly reddish circle segment in the centre of the canvas. In 1896 already, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) left his friend Joachim Gasquet the following words: “the sensations of colour which produce light give rise to abstractions […].” However, Cézanne nor Ensor have – unlike others before them – taken the step to abstraction. Ensor’s horizontal stratification of a sun sinking in the sea finds a visual echo in Cole’s Timescapes. Cole does not give us a horizontal layering of the spatial experience of the landscape but a vertical articulation of the light and colour sensations of the landscape in time.

For a Timescape, Cole makes a series of photographic recordings during a specific amount of time and from a fixed, specific location. For example, in ‘Timescape Dover’ (2007), on 17 October 2007, he photographs every minute for 150 minutes long the sea view from Dover towards the Belgian coast, De Panne to be exact. Each of the pictures shows in the upper half, above the horizon, the view of the sky, the skyscape of that moment, and in the lower half below the horizon, the sea – the seascape – as occurring at that instant. Afterwards, each image is reduced to its average colour and light value by a computer program, and the width of the image is reduced to a single, rather thin vertical strip. Chronologically placed next to each other in the Western reading order from left to right, the 150 stripes are a summary of the transformation of the landscape, at that location, which is sometimes specified with geographical coordinates, and during the specified time. Because Cole has an assistant doing the same exercise simultaneously on De Panne’s beach, looking towards Dover, and because he eventually combines the two Timescapes in such a way that the viewer of the diptych cannot simultaneously see the ‘Timescape Dover’ and the ‘Timescape De Panne’, he brings viewers in a situation where they realise that they can only be in one place at one time, by only using visual means. The dramatic nature of time and space staged simply and powerfully.

To start with the Timescapes – there is a first link between Cole’s works and some works by German artist Gerhard Richter (1932). In 2011, Richter develops his work ‘Strip’, a digital print on paper between aluminium and perspex (Diasec). The work consists of a vertically structured interplay of lines that has formal similarities with Cole’s Timescapes. By digitally dividing one of his previous abstract paintings into two equal vertical halves, reflecting the halves in each other, and finally repeating those reflections, Richter comes to a sequence of coloured lines. Could it be that Richter has so many doubts about the painting’s ability to mean something that he prefers to commission a print of the output of a computer transformed structure of a digital photo of a painting that he made with his own hands? Richter and Cole both apply digital photography and digital imaging. Richter departs from one of his own paintings to generate a second, derived, but independent and printed image. Cole starts from a series of photos to create a printed image that preserves a conceptual reference to its origin in the registration of an existing reality.

IV

In addition to Timescapes, Cole also makes Colorscapes. They make for a significant group within the oeuvre. For a Colorscape, Cole once again starts with a photographic record of a landscape. This can be an existing photograph he borrows from the Internet, a photograph of the Rocky Mountains for example, or, as is usually the case, a photograph he makes himself. Excellent examples of the latter type of Colorscapes are the two triptychs he realised in 2016, in the context of the exhibition project ‘El Camino. Le chemin entre deux points’. For this project about the almost mythical journey to Santiago de Compostella, Cole made, among other things, two triptychs that each contain three big ‘Colorscapes’: two 160 h x 160 cm side panels and a 170 h x 160 cm centre panel. For the ‘Colorscapes’ of each triptych, Cole took a picture of the sea in three different directions at one specific moment. The recordings for the first triptych are created in Finistère, the westernmost tip of France, on 31 March 2016 at 8:50 pm and the recordings for the second on 4 April 2016 at 7:45 pm in Fisterra, the westernmost point of Spain and the place where the pilgrims go to, after they have reached Santiago, to burn their clothes and shelve their shoes.

Colorscapes can be found in Cole’s oeuvre as large works on canvas and as small pieces on A4 size paper. A Colorscape is always derived from a single picture and hence stands on its own, but sometimes Cole groups different Colorscapes that are part of the same sequence of two or more recordings spread over time. Cole consistently presents those multiple Colorscapes proportionally spaced on the wall. In any case, for each Colorscape, the photographic source material, which is always a digital colour image, is read and interpreted by a computer program based on its colourist composition. The program reduces the colour information of the photographic image to 256 colours. Cole chooses to display 256 colours in a square grid of 256 squares, in 16 rows and 16 columns, positioning – once again with respect for the Western reading direction – the brightest colour at the top left and the darkest colour on the bottom right. For the smaller Colorscapes, he makes an inkjet print of the grid, on which he manually, in a careful and artisanal process, reproduces the 256 colours one by one in oil paint. Afterwards, he paints over the printed colour blocks carefully with the appropriate colour. For the larger Colorscapes, the inkjet print serves as a guide for an equally careful colour reconstruction in oil on canvas.

Because Cole only lets you read and interpret the registered landscapes on one level, that is to say in terms of colouristic values, it is no longer possible to find out how natural, how much or how little culturally influenced the registered landscape might have been. Together with the horizon – that separation between air and land – he ‘eclipses’ any tensions that are objectified historically as a result of human intervention in these landscapes. Cole is not interested in human intervention on nature or at least not to the extent that he would allow it in his work.

The landscape in our culture is such a familiar genre that the term landscape or landscape format is often used to indicate of a horizontal image (wider than it is high), whereas for a vertical image (higher than it is wide) we usually speak of portrait or portrait format. It is fascinating to note that Cole chooses the wide, low landscape format for his Timescapes but uses the portrait format for his Colorscapes. In his Colorscapes, Cole makes a chromatic DNA portrait of the visualised landscape.

The number 256 is omnipresent today. It is not only the smallest number that is a product of eight radices (28) or a perfect square (162), the integer also reflects the number of different values that can be found in each of the three colours out of which a digital image is often compiled: 256 values for red, 256 values for green and 256 values for blue. These three times 256 values, combined with one another, provide 16,777,216 possible colour shades. That Cole comes to a grid of (16 x 16 =) 256 colours for his Colorscapes should therefore not be a surprise. Surprisingly in this context, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) made two paintings which are based on the exact same grid of 16 x 16 squares. ‘Composition with grid 8: checkerboard composition with bright colours’ and ‘Composition with grid 9: checkerboard composition with dark colours’, both from 1919, show exactly the same grid, provided that Mondrian does not choose square boxes (and thus not for a square overall picture), but instead allegedly chooses an aspect ratio corresponding to the golden section. A second, more important difference is how the colour boxes are filled in. Cole does this by digitally analysing the colour photo of the photographed landscape. Mondrian, who has come to an abstraction from his study of the landscape and certain elements of it, fills his boxes purely intuitively and not based on a mathematical formula or some sort of perceived or registered reality. Mondrian compiles his grid compositions purely by means of carefully weighed colour choices, respectively within a range of bright colours (yellow, blue, pale red, white and light greys for one) and dark colours (red, blue and orangey brown for the other). Mondrian wants to realise a self-contained and self-sufficient ‘neoplastic’ (to be understood as ‘creating a new image’) painting. This is why he devotes a lot of attention to the painterly execution: variation in brush directions, adjustment of thickness and colour of the grid lines, etc. It is remarkable at least that Cole, who only recently became acquainted with these canvases of Mondrian, in tempore non suspecto, also deems his gridlines to be ‘free’ and treats them as anything but rigid. The grid lines are no dogmas. For example, they may be painted over partially and then retrospectively be put back in a slightly different colour.

Without being complete: there are still more 256s to be found in the history of modern and contemporary painting. In 1974, Gerhard Richter realises the big painting ‘256 colours’ (Kunstmuseum Bonn) with enamel paint on canvas. And Richter also has 256 different colours in 16 x 16 rectangular colour boxes. By manually mixing yellow, red, blue and green between themselves, and then blending those mixed colours with white, grey and black, he makes 256 colours that he – unlike Mondrian who works intuitively and Cole who works systematically – distributes randomly in the grid corresponding to the image plane. Richter’s work is no longer an attempt at meaning, no longer a visual unity, no longer a painting that represents in its composition and imagery an ideal world yet to be realised (like Mondrian’s work) or no longer a reference to some perceived or recorded reality (such as Cole’s work). In this and in many other (figurative) paintings, Richter expresses his profound doubts about a painting’s ability to mean something. Cole as well has doubts about the contemporary scenic capacities of a painting, since the references of his Colorscapes to the perceived landscape or to an image thereof can only be reconstructed and understood conceptually, favouring the mere enjoyment of the painting as pictorial realisation.

In the preface of the catalogue for ‘Cézanne: Les dernières années (1985-1906)’ (Paris 1978), William Rubin, then director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, New York, writes the following: “The way in which the 20th century conceived the act of painting and its process was first announced by Cezanne’s new way of composing a painting that made the drama of pictorial integration – the mosaic of decisions that determine its becoming a work of art – a subject for art itself. […] Whatever Cezanne’s intentions may be, an absolute emotional necessity to render his painting ‘real’ forces him to radically innovate in the only ways proper to painting, its inherent means. We thus find in Cezanne’s paintings a fragmentation, an abstraction and an affirmation of the surface […] a tectonic modulation of colour and an absence of the traditional ‘finite’, all which would become so many key elements in the future art of the twentieth century.” These are words that, almost even without mutatis mutandis, apply to Cole’s Colorscapes. Cole, as well, fragments the perceived landscape (in 256 colour shades), to the extent where the only thing left is an abstract image that represents nothing but the colours and the light, which he saw in the landscape and which were recorded by his camera. Cole as well confirms – despite the visual depth of the colours – the surface of the painting by – next to the conceptual dimension of the work – only preserving a composition of 256 gridded colour tiles, which can literally be understood as a tectonic modulation of colour. An effect that he enhances even more by allowing and leaving on the empty white margins (under the grid on the canvases and around the grid on the A4 sheets) a coarse drip paint, a paint brush test, ‘dirty’ fingerprints and paint splashes and by indicating (in handwriting or not) date, hour and sometimes place of the motif registration. Cole shows the process of ‘realising while painting’. Just like Courbet, Cézanne and Mondrian did it. In painting, it is about the surface of the work, as Cole understood well, and, as Mondrian confirms a few years after Cézanne: the surface is the only thing that matters in painting. When Mondrian saw the interaction between Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Cézanne in the first exhibition of the Modern Art Circle in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the greatest revelation for him turned out to be the pictorial structure, the fundamental unity of drawing and colour that Cézanne emphasised. So, for Cézanne as well, the act of constructing was done on the surface of the painting (Janssen, p.399).

V

The landscape, that is what the eye is rewarded with when it points towards the horizon. When the gaze focuses on the undefinable horizon, which symbolises the transition between the world we (think we) know and the world behind that, of which we are now aware that it is there, but that is unknown to us for as long as we do not get into it. If we do not look, there is no horizon. Looking is a first sign of curiosity. The very etymology of the word indicates that ‘horizon’ stands for ‘boundary’. Any self-respecting artist does not give a rip about non-self-imposed boundaries; Cole a fortiori. Born in Ghent, he always travels to other, unprecedented horizons. As a traveller in real life and as an imaginator in art, but always in the spirit of Lemaire’s argument: “The degree of attention to the horizon expresses the degree of reserve a human has for his culture, translates the reservation he has in regard to his own creations. Interest in the horizon means having the will not to coincide with oneself, not wanting to be pinned down by a definite identity, in short: testifying that the factual is not identical to the possible.” (Lemaire, p.81). Cole seeks horizons, thematises them in his work, but does not feel obliged at all to actually visualise those horizons in his work. Paradoxically, in his work, the horizon, the place where heaven and earth appear to be united, is often (inconspicuously) absent.

The line of the horizon is often an element of distinction between a landscape and seascape. In a landscape, it is not always easy to pinpoint a horizon (line). All too often, elements of the natural landscape like trees, forests or mountains or traces of human, cultural interventions, hide the horizon from view. This is different for a seascape. At sea, there are no significant obstacles that stand in the way of the horizon. Whether a seascape shows a horizon depends entirely on the viewer’s point of view. Seen from the beach, the horizon is always identifiable: the horizon is at the eye level of the viewer. The height moves along with the observer: if he or she is in the water or is standing on a higher level, the horizon is on a different height, according to his observation. In other words, the height of the horizon in the image of the observer depends on their position. Courbet made a lot of paintings in the second half of the 1860s that he himself described as “landscapes of the sea”. They distinguish themselves from seascapes of other painters by omitting the anecdotal, narrative and by honouring the power of nature, as the main motif, in the form of a powerful oncoming and overtopping wave. The paintings are often started on the spot, i.e. ‘en plein air’ in Étretat, Normandy, and finished in the studio in Paris. It is remarkable at least that Courbet chose precisely such a volatile motif to realise paintings that first of all want to show their plastically interesting ‘solution’. Courbet was not able yet to capture the moment of a wave curling, it is probably even unthinkable that he would be able to recall such a given moment in sufficient detail to construct a precise image on the basis of sketches and memory images later in his studio. Courbet works mostly from memory in the studio. He reconstructs and invents an image based on his first notes and his many impressions, realistic and credible. Later artists, such as Cézanne, the Impressionists and the Cubists, in other words: the first artists of the modernist movements, will focus on radically unmovable motives as an alibi for making pictorially interesting canvases. Cézanne paints the Mont Sainte-Victoire more than repeatedly to realise ‘harmony parallel to nature’ with visual means; Cézanne can return to the mountain as much as he wants, it does not overtop or float. Claude Monet (1840-1926) paints a whole series of canvases on the motif of the centuries-old facade of the cathedral of Rouen precisely to show how the changing light is capable of affecting the shape, which is what triggered Cézanne – when seeing the work of Monet – to make the laconic statement “I don’t see anything.” Piet Mondrian is 34 when Cézanne dies in 1906. At that moment, he develops step by step a type of painting that evolves from a perceived and depicted true nature to a type of painting that fully owes its meaning to the power of expression of its visual means: composition, line and colour. It is not as if Mondrian, who was familiar with the work of Cézanne, has painted a lot of mountains. At most a few dunes from the Dutch Zeeland landscape at Walcheren. However, Mondrian, who was mostly, not to say completely, caught up in landscape painting for the first 20 years of his career (Janssen, p.231), has indeed painted some very interesting seascapes and has, among other things, via some forestscapes and studies of trees, come a long way from portraying a landscape or some of its elements, a windmill for example, to paintings that do not reference an ever-perceived and possibly recorded nature, but that by their meticulous interaction between line and colour, light and matter, radiate their independence, their autonomy and their non-subordination to nature. Not Picasso or Braque in their Cubist period, Cézanne nor Courbet, let alone the painters of the Barbizon school ever crossed the border into the non-representative, non-figurative imagery. The very careful Mondrian is one of the first to do it and to go all the way.

For his ‘Blue Prints’ (2017), Cole has gone to sea. At the coast of Le Tréport, Normandy, only 100 km from Étretat, where Courbet sets up his seascapes, he walks with his camera into the surf of the Channel and, with a very small time offset, makes two pictures of an oncoming wave. Both photos are put on top of each other later, the first shot, which can be named the oldest one, in blue inkjet on paper and the second or youngest recording in black-and-white print on the Plexiglass that will be displayed in front of the paper. Two recordings in time are set out in space. The horizon on these pictures is high. In this, Cole differs from the classic landscape format that lies 3/8 from the top of the canvas. A proportion that corresponds to the golden ratio. Cole turns that proportion around and arrives at 5/8 sea and 3/8 air by times. In his paintings of waves and sea, Courbet lets the horizon come to the centre of the canvas at most. He looked and painted the sea from on the land; he literally looked down on it, but also with a great deal of awe. More striking still, however, in Courbet’s seascapes is how he treats the horizon. His horizon becomes a luminous, almost glowing line between the turbulent sea and the equally stirring skies. It seems as if Courbet wants to look in the future through that glowing horizon, as if to find out how the world, how the art, would evolve, along that way.

On several occasions, Stijn Cole explicitly introduced the motif of the horizon. In 2006, for the exhibition ‘Ohne Titel’ (curator Philippe Van Cauteren) he painted the walls of the exhibition space of the Kunstverein Ahlen in the blue key and green key colours. The dividing line between the colours, i.e. the horizon of what can be called a universal landscape, corresponds to the artist’s eye level. In the completely darkened room, he then projects, divided over six projectors, a series of black slides, each of which is cut-out so that a white surface is projected on the walls. Those white surfaces reveal locally the blue-green landscape, which is invisible elsewhere. All surfaces projected in that manner are with respect for the dimensions of the originals and proportionally derived from 83 existing landscapes from the collection of the Hermitage (St. Petersburg), the Metropolitan Museum (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Ghent), The National Gallery (London), the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) and Tate Britain (London). The projections are oriented in such a manner that the (invisible) horizons of the selected landscapes coincide with the horizon of the locally visible wall painting. In the catalogue for the East Flanders Province Award for Fine Art 2009, Cole again aligns the miniature reproductions of the 83 landscapes on the imaginary horizon that they visualise jointly. Or still, in the exhibition ‘Picture This’ (2006) in Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Cole hangs a blue and green key painted canvas, in composition and size derived from Constable’s landscape, in such a way that the dividing line between the two colours of his canvas becomes defining for the height of the presentation of landscape paintings from the permanent museum collection next to his canvas. Again, because he unites the horizons of the different works.

VI

There is something to be said about Cole reducing the landscapes in which he does not put a horizon to still lifes or portraits. Still lifes and portraits, the other important genres from the history of painting, (usually) do not show horizons. In a still life or portrait, the attention is not meant to be diverted from the motif or the portrayed person to a deeper horizon. During his eponymous exhibition in the Château de Chimay (2017) Cole presents two drawings ‘1:1’ [read: one to one]. For these drawings, whose title reads as a scale, Cole made a metal frame whose inner dimensions correspond to the image format of the subsequent drawing. He then set up the frame vertically in the park of Chimay’s castle, in such a manner that from a distance of exactly two meters from the frame he saw through the ‘window’ of the frame an interesting tree. Cole captured exactly that image on photo. After that, he carefully translated the image of the black-and-white photo with pencil and with a personal technique onto the paper using projection. In this way, he only transmits the bright and dark hues of the projected image on the surface of the sheet – without worrying about depth of view. And although he shows landscapes, or photographically mechanised interpretations thereof, he pushes away – despite the used window frame – the classic window function of each figurative image. When presenting the work, he puts down a metal disc at exactly the same distance from the drawing as the picture was taken from the frame. The viewer who wishes to do so, can stand as it were, at the location of the camera. A landscape, let alone a horizon, is surprisingly enough nowhere to be seen for the spectator anymore. There is no more figure ground story. Just as for his Blue Prints, and exactly like Courbet, Cole collects the material ‘en plein air’ and finishes it afterwards in the studio. The trees that Mondrian drew and painted up until 1912, which can be seen as the starting point of his transition from the figurative to the abstract, linked the landscape tradition from the 17th century to the future, to abstract art (Janssen, p.601). With the trees out of ‘1:1’, Cole, as well, makes abstract art.

A few years earlier, Cole realised a series of double drawings based on recordings made in Branitz, Poland. For ‘2 Steps Aside’ (2012) he picked a tree motif or forest motif that he photographed from a certain point, after which he photographed the same motif a second time from a position that is two steps ‘aside’ from the first point of view. The pictures were then projected and drawn out, and of course, the two drawings of each work of the series are also on display spaced with respect for those two steps aside. Other ‘1:1’ works are the drawings ‘De Maten’ (2013), based on photographs of the cut-outs of soil vegetation of De Maten, a nature reserve near Genk. Cole lays a number of frames down on the ground, the inner size of which corresponds to the image format of the drawings that he will later make – in the studio of course – of the photo recordings of the cut-outs that the frames have edged in the landscape.

Cole defied the classical, renaissance perspective even more. The Cubists have suggested the absent third dimension on the planimetric plane of the painting by bringing the ‘tour of the object’ and taking into account ‘the mobility of the gaze’. Cole is anything but a cubist. Not even in ‘2 Steps Aside / Branitz’ (2012), he allows the viewer to do the tour of the object. He offers two images of more or less the same motif, but he separates them from each other as if he wanted to say they really do not have anything to do with each other. An image is an image and relates to nothing but to itself: one to one. Needless to repeat that together the two parts of each work of the Polish series are by definition also about a time elapsing and can therefore be considered a sort of Timescape …

In Chimay, Cole also presented sculptural variations of the same principle: two one-to-one casts of fragments, each about 1m², of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire – or at least that’s the way an art historian would be inclined to put it. On the spot, ‘en plein air’, on the mountain northeast of Aix-en-Provence, Cole makes a negative casting of a part of the mountain. Later, in the studio, he refines the mould with beeswax, ultimately obtaining a positive reconstruction of that piece of Mont Sainte-Victoire. He realises similar works in a similar action in the summer of 2017 on the coast of Cancale in Britanny. The castings ‘1:1 / Cancale’ (2017), again cut-outs of a landscape, are shown in the exhibition ‘1:1 / Marine’ (C-Mine, Genk, September 2017) in a spacious exhibition landscape with the Blue Prints from Le Tréport.

With the problem of the horizon, we touch on the problem of depth in a painting. Cézanne seemed to have his doubts. On the one hand, he indicated that he could never accept an image with a lack of modelling or gradation: “This is nonsense.” Or still “Nature … is more depth than surface.” While on the other hand he undoubtedly realised that any attempt at abstraction could only result in a rejection of three-dimensionality. Cole is more radical and therefore clearer in this regard. By letting a computer program interpret the image of the motif in his Colorscapes solely on the basis of its chromatic values and by explicitly indicating – in the title or caption – that his image only represents a snapshot, that his image does not have the ambition to be an all-encompassing unity of time and space, he even raises serious doubts about the meaningfulness of such ambition within the realm of painting. In his Timescapes and in his 1:1 works as well, Cole extracts the depth from the portrayed landscapes. Those drawings, because that is what both types of works are when judged by the graphics they are showing, are of the type mapped landscapes. That is, they only show an exact, flattened out description of a number of non-hierarchical, characteristic elements (Janssen, p.249). Cézanne, at least apparently, does not seem to pay much attention to the horizon. Even in his numerous landscapes on the motif of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, he paints a skyline rather than actually indicating a horizon line. A mountain stands more in the way of a view on the horizon, then that it facilitates a view on the horizon. In other words, if Cézanne was interested in the horizon for some kind of pictorial or other reason, he would probably have chosen another motif. It simply means that Cézanne wants to realise his landscape – as far as it is still possible to speak of a landscape, so better put, his painting – fully in and on the surface of the canvas. As a mere organisation of paint and colour on the canvas. If Cézanne occupies an essential place at the beginning of modern painting, it is precisely because he has “dismantled the space” (Jean Bazaine) to (simply) be left with an image. In all the works mentioned, Cole continues on that exact path. And he shares another consistency with Cézanne on that path. Walking this path means that the artist, the creator of the work of art, is subject to the re-creation of the motif that became autonomous. The personal input or the emotional and characteristic expression of the artist, they must yield to the visual realisation that is in the artist’s mind. Today we would say: to the concept that the artist wants to realise as pure and faithful as possible. The artist should only comply with the requirements of this realisation.

VII

“Especially the mountains, the forest and the water are the archetopoi [archetypal places] of the romantic worship [of nature and landscape]” argues landscape philosopher Ton Lemaire (p.45). These are all places and components of the landscape that can be found in Cole’s oeuvre. Is Cole, who also made works that are reproductions, stripped of all cultural components, of paintings by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the romantic landscape artist par excellence, then a late, 21th century romantic? It may be romantic, but certainly mainly pragmatic motives that have led Cole to live with his family in one of the most remote villages of southern Belgium. Nomen est omen, in Seloignes, – il/elle(s) s’éloigne(nt) – one distances him/herself from culture and comes closer to nature. Cole is no romantic. Cole no longer belongs to the generation of artists who believed that the representation of a (puny) human in an overwhelming landscape was able to reproduce the aspirations of that tormented man. Cole is an artist of his time who objectifies the relationship of man to nature and his observation of the latter to the benefit of art. Humans do not have to come into view anymore in those landscapes. The human who perceives the landscape ensures that there can be a landscape at all. The spectators of Cole’s landscapes take in the places people used to inhabit in the landscapes.

It is not because Cole works with photography and computer programs, that he makes his motives overly scientific or academic. Despite explicitly mentioning time and space coordinates in his artwork, he leaves the wonderful mystery of our existential time/space experience intact. He saves the repeated moments of that experience and by doing so expresses only its increased transience. All elements of his artistic creation (invention, realisation, presentation) are focused on the analysis of the perception and the observation of those fragments of rural nature that still remain, in the best possible art historical tradition. Cole does not (yet) depict any urban landscapes or culturally influenced landscapes. He does not (yet) address issues such as climate change, whether induced by human activity or not. Showing an elevated horizon line in his seascapes or not showing a horizon at all in his Colorscapes and other works, does not make him an activist. Cole currently only retains the horizon in his Timescapes. That is the most important horizon that human beings, as agents, must observe in nature, the long-term horizon. We have spent centuries catching up with the horizon and that has been enough. Due to the unmistakable ‘limits to growth’, we have to return today to the horizon where he once lay: far from us. Not immediately accessible, not nearby. We have conquered nearly every viable horizon and have robbed ourselves of each and every one of them, of every sight, of every desire to unknown distance. Throughout his visual oeuvre, Cole contributes in an artistic, visual, aesthetic and non-discursive manner – so, without many words – to a greater awareness of the experience of our partner that nature should be and of which we continue to make up an integral part.

Jo Coucke

Les Blacas, La Verdière, Haut-Var, July 2017

Sources, including:

Adhémar, H., Brion-Guerry, L., Monnier, G., Rewald, J., Rubin, W., Cézanne: Les dernières années (1895-1906). Catalogue of the eponymous exhibition in Grand Palais, Paris. Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 1978.

Barnes, J. In ogenschouw: essays over kunst. Uitgeverij Atlas Contact, Amsterdam / Antwerp, 2015.

Esman, A.R., Fuchs, R. Vervulde verlangens: Gesprekken over kunst in onze tijd. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1997.

Janssen, H. Piet Mondriaan: een nieuwe kunst voor een ongekend leven / Een biografie. Hollands Diep / Overamstel Uitgevers, Amsterdam, 2016.

Lemaire, T. Filosofie van het landschap. 1970, 8th edition, 2006. Uitgeverij Ambo / Anthos, Amsterdam.

Schreier, C. (red.). Gerhard Richter : Over schilderen / vroege werken. Catalogue of the eponymous exhibition in Kunstmuseum, Bonn and S.M.A.K. – Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent. Mercatorfonds, Brussels, 2017.

Watzmann is one of the most famous mountain ranges used in German Romanticism.

According to legend the range originated when King Watz and his family were turned into stone and some summits are referred to as Big Watz, Watzfrau ( Lady Watz) and Watzkinder.

Casper David Friedrich never laid eyes on the mountains but used a watercolour by one of his students. The rockformations featured on the foreground were drawn into detail in other locations by the artist. He combined the accurate topography with a typical romantic staging.

The capricious rocks in front flanked by abysses left and right form a rather dramatic prelude to the mountain peaks. The tension between rising and falling forces featured in the foreground takes us to the symbol of peace and eternity in the background.

The work can be considered as the prototype of visionary, religiously inspired landscape painting.

This heavily laden with meanings painting is the experimenting playground for artist Stijn Cole. Without previous viewing of the original work, he copies the painting full scale into a black and white drawing. This not so much as a sketch but as an exact transcriptial of each topographic detail. The grain in the large paper makes it difficult to match the detail and deepest tones of the painting . This copy is confronted with a colour analysis based on a coloured reproduction of the original painting. In both cases a distance towards reality is created: the black and white sketch was made after a photograph and the colour analysis is presumably based on the different colors of the reproduction.

In the works of Friedrich drawing and color are equivalent components of the painting. In Romanticism this is rather exceptional as it is mostly pictorial.

Stijn Cole is working his way into the dualism of the painting. On the one hand, he needed an imperfect black and white copy that is reminiscent of 19th century reproduction graphics by copying from engravings as was often done in the academies of the 18th and 19th century. Throughout this process he looks back into the past and joins the countless historical manipulations found in Friedrich’s image. On the other hand he looks at the composition of the paintings -Friedrich’s colour spectrum- in an analysis reminiscent of the still steadily growing material-technical analysis which ancient masterpieces recently become subjected to.

This analysis in turn led to a pictorial transformation on the canvas.

The painted canvas is square, only the height is determined by the size of the original painting.

Stijn Cole manages to devise a system and develops clear, almost simple results. These however hide a complex set of concerns and relationships.

The starting point seems random and without obligation: the choice of Friedrich, the reproduction technology and its derived products. The method however is systematic.

The Great Watzman is the last and largest in a series in which the artist copies, interprets and analyzes various works of Friedrich. This project also fits into a wider range of investigations of the components of natural reproduction, the conditions that influence our perception and the graphic and pictorial possibilities offered by such research.

Hidden amongst the detachment in Stijn Cole’s work process is a great interest in the ancient art of landscape painting together with a personal affection towards nature – a feeling rarely admitted nowadays.

The mix of scientific experiment and emotional empathy is something he shares with the Romantic painters of the time of Friedrich himself.

In his method Stijn Cole seems to hand over the emotional experience of nature to external factors and the logic of the experiment which he than brings together in his artwork.

But it is nevertheless filled with emotion: emotion in experiencing art, nature and the joy of drawing and painting.

—

Robert HOOZEE

Director of The Museum of Fine Arts Ghent

One of the many challenges in art history is the quest for the ultimate spot in the landscape where great artists planted one’s easel and started creating their famous masterworks. It seems an impossible mission, the endless search for the needle in the haystack, but the satisfaction is immense : the discovery of the many transitions the landscape underwent since and, above all, one’s hope to compare the magic of the masterpiece against the reality of the real landscape. In this digital age all representations of landscapes seem easily retracable. When not the product of a virtual reality, the landscapes are very often found with help from tools such as Google Earth. But still, one of the most famous landscapes as seen on a Windows 98 screensaver, was not that easily found. The “Windows-landscape” with its bright green and blue colours and used by loads of people as their PC -screensaver was the starting point for artist Stijn Cole in his search for the exact spot where this picture of that landscape originated. The filename was a very vague first reference pointing towards its location : “Ireland.bmp”. The Irish Tourist Information organisation was the next step offering a more concrete location: the hill situated in the right corner of the landscape turned out to be Mount Errigal. Stijn Cole than set off on his journey to Ireland . In the surroundings of Mount Errigal he searched, print of the Windows screensaver in hand, for an as near to perfect corresponding horizon.The incentive of his Ireland-project was Cole’s idea to create two panoramic Colorscapes of the same landscape. For the first one he used the Windows-image, for the second his own photographs of the Irish landscape he took on site. To create his Colorscapes Stijn Cole uses landscapes found on the Web or self-made pictures of landscapes he than transforms, using of a very simple digital process, into a totally new landscape-experience. Through the use of a computerized programme 256 of the most common colours found in each picture are classified in small cubes ranging from light to dark. This way one again experiences the landscape with the lighter colour tones on top and the darker ones on the bottom . These digital colourfiles are copied exactly in 256 paint colours to be transferred onto canvas. The search for the Windows landscape finally resulted in a photograph with the same horizon and the same hill in the right hand corner. Whereas the screensaver picture is characterized by highly saturated colours and a sense of non-spectacular unreal beauty, the photograph taken by Cole in Ireland seemed to be the most close to our stereotypical view of the Irish landscape: grey skies, sheep in meadows and these typical dark green and brownish colourschemes.The perspective which defines the landscape and link both photographs together are however no longer parameters defining the Colorscapes. The three-dimensional notion no longer exists: colour is the primary parameter in a fundamentally two-dimensional painting. This way the same landscape peculiarly results in two totally different painting experiences. In this digital era Stijn Cole finds an original solution which results in a new sublimated form of pure painting.