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VIVIAN VAN BLERK

A Dry Season
Medusa
Cow in a tight spot
Raft
Gluttony
Eden Park - That was Smith Street
Transmigration of Souls, Tweni Beach
Dutch Wedding Portrait
Landshark
The Architect dreams
Hausmann's Folly, alone

There is no there there.

Gertrude Stein

Photographs are of models built, decors arranged, collages composed or of just a fleeting moment. After the photograph is taken, its temporary model is dismantled, destroyed or recycled. The moment has passed.

 

The original gone, our only access to that vanished place is through the photograph.

 

The  photograph  tantalizes. It is a door to a world where the viewer's imagination is engaged. One might wonder what happened before and what will happen next. That which  hides in the shadows or  lies just outside the frame is the artist's gift to the viewer's fancy.

 

Vivian van Blerk, Paris 2016

 

I began making ceramics in Lebanon in 2017. Temporary constructions  for photographs  become finished pieces. Even as durable sculptures , the fictions created remain sealed beneath the brilliant screen of ceramic glaze and remain   mysterious, silent and removed from us in time and in space and scale, unattainable  like worlds seen through  photographs.

Paris 2019

Archipel

 Avec « Archipel » Vivian van Blerk imagine  toute une  nouvelle série d’îlots formés d'éléments d’architecture, véhicules abandonnés et autres ruines, derniers témoins de la présence de l’homme sur terre,  envahis par  les restes de nos déchets mais aussi nouvellement colonisés par toute une faune et une végétation aussi bien terrestres qu’aquatiques.

Ces nouveaux micro écosystèmes  sont parfois reliés entre eux par des bancs de méduses assurant ainsi une nouvelle  solidarité animale.

La notion de temps n’a plus aucune importance, la notion de bien ou de mal non plus.

 

Pascal Odille

Expert CNES - Paris, Avril 2022

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Ghosts of Futures Past

2022

Between being modeled and finally glaze fired, ceramics enjoy an ephemeral in-between life.

 

These panted clay sculptures gather in an installation. The moment is captured on photographic film.

Afterwards each piece is fired. The gouache and acrylic paint applied to the clay for the photograph  burns away and they emerge from the kiln wearing a new and permanent ceramic glaze.

Whe pieces are dispersed, the photograph remains as a trace of the diasappeared past.

Ghosts of Futures Past, Colour photograph, 105x100cm.jpg

2020 - Miscellaneous months

Clay is such a rich medium, a ceramic artisan can spend a lifetime to discover and use only a fraction of its endless formal possibilities. As an artist coming late to clay, I do not aspire to replicate the patiently acquired craft of a potter, yet neither can I let myself settle into one narrow groove when there are so many potential languages available.

 

The fifteen months following the giant installation of vanities in Beyond the Vessel have been dedicated to varying themes and forms and other technical approaches, to discover new roads down which I might travel further.

This is also the groundwork to ultimately combine ceramics with photography.

The Glade / La Clairière

The Glade / La Clairière

Stoneware and porcelain ceramic group

The Glade (detail)

The Glade (detail)

Stoneware and porcelain ceramic group

The Glade

The Glade

Stoneware and porcelain ceramic group. Detail

The Glade

The Glade

"Diorama" Photograph of Stoneware and porcelain ceramic group hand coloured BEFORE FINAL FIRING WHICH ERASED THE COLOUR.

Le Malade Imaginaire / The Hypochondriac

Le Malade Imaginaire / The Hypochondriac

Porcelain

La traversée du désert

La traversée du désert

Stoneware. Porcelain elements.

Narcissus on the Styx II

Narcissus on the Styx II

Porcelain. Mirror.

Narcissus on the Styx

Narcissus on the Styx

Porcelain. Mirror.

Narcissus on the Styx III

Narcissus on the Styx III

Porcelain. Mirror.

Narcissus on the Styx IV

Narcissus on the Styx IV

Porcelain. Mirror

In a Dark Forest Lost

In a Dark Forest Lost

Stoneware

Rings

Rings

Porcelain

Finger Rings

Finger Rings

Stoneware and porcelain

The Reading Room

The Reading Room

Stoneware

Tower of Babel

Tower of Babel

Stoneware

Tower of Babel

Tower of Babel

Stonware

The Very Thought of You

The Very Thought of You

Stoneware

Adventure in the Garden

Adventure in the Garden

Stoneware urn

The Meduses

The Meduses

Porcelain wall-mounted applique

Jellyworld

Jellyworld

Earthenware wall-mounted consol. With porcelain rhino

The Meduses

The Meduses

Porcelain wall-mounted applique

Jellyworld

Jellyworld

Earthenware wall-mounted consol.

Haussmann's Island

Haussmann's Island

Stoneware and porcelain

City half a4.jpg

On the Beach

2019

A fleet of turtle arks carry life and memory across oceans to populate a long-abandoned city.

 

Curated by Catherine Milner of Messums Wiltshire with Károly Aliotti of Meşher, Istanbul.

 

ON THE BEACH participates in  BEYOND THE VESSEL, an exhibition of ceramics by thirteen contemporary artists at the Meşher Gallery, 211 Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul, until 22 December 2019. The show then travels to the United Kingdom.

Stoneware, porcelain, photography. 

Vanities II and III
Paris and Beirut

Through 2018 I explored the rich vein of formal and narrative  possibilities suggested by the human skull as a ceramic vessel.

 

A high point of this project was the month residency at Bkerzay ceramic center in Lebanon where I was able to create the bulk of the collection exhibited at the annual

Beirut Design Fair.

Vanities I

2017

 

I caught the ceramics bug in Beirut. Returning to Paris I wanted to continue transforming simple vessels into narrative worlds. But now working alone, I no longer had raw bowls, bottles, cups or vases as bases to work on. impatient to get on and make works, I was not yet ready to learn the patient, precise craft of pottery first.

The solution was in the studio space I share with archaeologists who store all the skeletons excavated from the ancient burial grounds beneath the local church, Saint Lucien in La Courneuve. Having already photographed and drawn some of the more intact skulls, I found them not difficult to model acceptably in clay.

So my basic vessel  was the skull. It brings with it a reminder of mortality and of the memories and  feelings of life that cling to our remains. It has an outside and an inside on which stories can be told.

 

Vanities I culminated in an exhibition at the Wunderkammer in Brussels in December 2017.

Vanities 1

Beasts of Beirut

2017

My introduction to ceramics came  in April 2017 when invited to collaborate with Katya Traboulsi, multimedia artist, and Hala Matta, ceramicist, at Namika Atelier in Beirut, Lebanon. I modeled relief sculpture on  forms built by Hala which were then glazed by Katya.

We worked in various stoneware clays and once in  Raku clay.

Photography acquires some of the dignity it lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of the real and shows us things that have ceased to exist. 

 

Marcel Proust

in Swann's Way

I and My Chimney

2011 - 

The chimney hearth endures as generations  come and go, playing out their passing passions .

"The Flood Foretold",

2016

No.8 of the series of nine photographs

Chimney
Household Gods
Worldly Goods
Flight
Playing God
Act of God
The Golden Age
The Architect Dreams
Our House
Buffon
Buffon's Grandchildren
2011 -
 
Species have had time  to adapt to man's presence. They find niches to inhabit and even unsuspected opportunities to evolve.
 
 

Georges-Louis Leclerc 

de Buffon

 

An engraving from his Histoire Naturelle, 1753 - 1767.

 

Buffon's foregrounding of  animals against   real or fantasy environments is the mainspring for this series.

The Pests 

Colour photograph from retouched b&w negative

125cm x 125cm, 2014

7 Vices

On the Beach

Colour photographs in triptych, 100 x 240cm

Seven Capital Vices

2008

A castaway arrives on a barren coast. Before the tide rises and chases everyone off the beach, he must choose. Either he joins the Vices in their earthly passions or he scales the ruins of the church to hitch a ride on a balloon. Where they go to to is uncertain, but it is away from this infernal shore.

 

 

Sloth
Anger
Gluttony
Pride
Envy
Greed
Lust
Hippo
Hippopotamus and Destiny
2000 - 2001
 
The wild beasts' raft lands ashore long before the floodwaters go down. When the waters do recede, the animals find themselves trapped on the tallest mountain in the world where they must survive as best they can...
 
Hundreds of years later when a young mountain hippopotamus dreams of mud and sinewy rivers winding through the veld, she decides its time to find her way home.

Sphinx

Colour photograph

100 x 100cm, 2000

The Awakening
Cableway (Night)
Moon
The Office
The Library
Shadehouse
Aquarium
Desert
Snail Morning
After the Party
The Company of Snails
The Cabbage Tree
The Fate of Big Animals
Les Nuisibles

From a New World

2001 - 2004

 

When explorers discovered the Americas for Europe, artists  painted still-lives of sometimes real, sometimes imagined, plants and creatures, 

 

This New World is just a little further west.

 

 

 

 

Blind Fish

Color photograph from retouched b&w negative

50 x 50cm, 2001

Boschaert's Flowers (pink)
Minotaur(purple)
Butterfly Machine
Know Thyself
The Taxidermist's Table
Dirty Bird (purple)
Waiting on the Volcano
New World

Cow Travels in Time and in Space and contemplates her Mortality

1998-1999

 

In a distant field a cow wonders if there is more to life than eating grass, giving milk and birthing calves. So she quits her enclosure and travels across the world, voyages in time and into space.

Cow in Space

Colour photograph

47x47cm

Cow and the Old Dictator
Cow in the Blue Grotto
Cow and the Sublime
Cow on the Paleolithic Beach
Cow deep in the Forest
Cow in the Ruins of the Museum
Cow and the Big Catch
Cow in the Inner City
Cow

Midas

Gum Bichromate print

30x30cm

2011

Metamorphoses

For this series,  rather than make up my own stories, I put the modern and accessible art language of photography  in service of an ancient poem whose intelligence deserves to be known by every generation.

 

2011

Using pigments and sunlight to make gum bichromate prints from the negatives, some of the jarring details of modernity are softened. The handmadeness of these photographs aims to make them both immediate and timeless. Like the Metamorphoses.

 

2012

A year later when I had taken the photographs for a second series, luck would have it that Arnaud Levènes at  the photography center, La Capsule in Le Bourget, offered me 30m of out-of-date colour photo paper to print on. So rather than sober 30x30cm gum bichromate prints, the second Metamorphoses series transformed into highly-coloured 125cm x 125cm darkroom prints.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Triton
Medea
Dedalus and Icarus
Pygmalion
Orpheus and Eurydice
Icarus
Atalanta and Hippomenus
Apollo and Daphne
Arachne
Hermaphrodite and Salmacis
Dryopee
Acis and Galatea
Battle of Centaurs and Lapiths

The shoot took place on a property in Anjou. A family with their friends and neighbours acted out scenes from the Metamorphoses

Public Flesh 2009

Eden Park 2009

 

Gallerist Chris Boïcos commissioned a series for a show on the male nude.

 

At the time I was experimenting coating transparent glass with black&white photographic emulsion. Printed on transparent glass. The images become more readable once  white or  a colour is painted behind.

 

In the first series Public Flesh, classical sculptures, photographed in the Louvre museum and retro-painted with fleshy colours, come alive amongst oblivious visitors.

 

Then in Eden Park, Louvre warriors from another age enter contemporary South Africa through collages of airports, sea-fronts, doctor's waiting rooms...

 

 

Public Flesh - Corridor

B&W photo emulsion and paint on glass

20x20cm

Eden Park - After the Flood
Public Flesh - On the stairs
Eden Park - Waiting Room
Eden Park - Prometheus
Public Flesh - Caryatid
PublicFlesh - Cour Carrée
Public Flesh - La Lutte
Public Flesh - Orator

The Attic Studio

 

Two years in an attic studiospace  over a garage in Cape Town next to a house crammed with a collector's picture frames, oriental rugs and fragments of antique sculptures. 

+

Michaelis Art School photo darkrooms to print big photographs  and mix the chemical toners to colour them.

+

A zoology department happy to lend their shabbier skeletons and bottled creatures.

+

The Drama School that allowed wigs and costumes out for a couple of days.

+

Students willing to pose late at night in uncomfortable positions for no money at all.

+

A vision of far-away Europe imagined through her great historical paintings...

 

and you get  two Attic Studio series. 1994 and 1995.

Angel and Sphinx

Hand-toned B&W print

148x55cm

The artist in his Studio

The artist in his Studio

Eva

Eva

Storeroom

Storeroom

The Connoisseur

The Connoisseur

Self-portrait

Self-portrait

Lady Waiting

Lady Waiting

End of Summer

End of Summer

The Beautiful Sean as Judith

The Beautiful Sean as Judith

Public flesh
Metamorphoses
Postcards from South Africa
2015
 
The South Coast of Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa is a place full of wonders. The land lies thick with vivid memories. Even the places I discover for the first time are familiar.  Ordinary, suburban and dingey then  lush, incomprehensible, spectacular and beautiful. Home
 
Daily collages made during  two weeks visiting family 
 
 
 
 
 
Umzimkulu River Panorama
Collage and paint
35x45cm
Tweni Swimming Beach
End of Season
The White Oribi
Stanlo's, Sunwich Port
Coastal Road to Shepstone
Over Mzimkulu River
Tweni Beach Dawn
Dead Eucalyptus
Attic
Postcards
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