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)