Perrotin is pleased to present the second exhibition Focus, an initiative dedicated to special projects and thematic presentations. This time, Focus offers an intimate setting for Pieter Vermeersch to explore his artistic research of painting expands beyond the confinement of the canvas.
Vermeersch’s artwork feeds on all the antagonisms of the discipline, seeking, for example, to be both figurative (it always has a photographic source, and these photographs are always made by Vermeersch, even when they are what he calls “accidental”) and abstract (because these “accidental” photographs often only have to offer a few informal color variations).
Even when the canvas is “abstract,” it is paradoxically fabricated as a photorealistic painting, the photographic image being reproduced in it through a meticulous system of grids.
Text by Eric Troncy
Born in 1973 in Kortrijk, Belgium
Lives and works between Turin, Italy and Antwerp, Belgium
Pieter Vermeersch’s (Kortrijk, 1973) artistic research of painting expands beyond the confinement of the canvas. His work often consists of large spatial interventions, consistently subverting territory whether conceived for an exhibition space or adjusted to a pre-existing architectural site. In addition to the immersive, painterly installations and gradient wall paintings, his oeuvre also includes an array of ephemeral zero degree paintings on canvas. Pieces are brought to a concrete reality by the irreversible process of chiseling and milling natural stone. His works are complimented by a series of photographic prints or marble slabs reactivated with delicate touches of paint, a stroke of the brush or gradual color planes. With representation and abstraction set as parameters, Vermeersch’s oeuvre triggers infinitesimal perceptual experiences, presenting us with a sense of color that is referential of the gap between appearance and disappearance; the gap in which the divisions between two and three dimensional, immaterial and tangible, time and space are blurred.