BENDT EYCKERMANS

In his paintings, Eyckermans employs cinematic lighting and highly mediated imagery to suggest narratives that extend beyond the works’ borders. Drawing on his own life and experiences, he builds his paintings from composite sketches, allowing for various spatial distortions to accumulate as he works. Throughout his compositions, Eyckermans interjects historical references, including those to the sculptural practices of his father and grandfather, who previously used the studio in which he works. Combining these references with traces of contemporary life, the works suggest that modernity and historicity can exist as part of the same continuum, and build on one another to create new visual languages.

Eyckermans continues this inquiry in the paintings that comprise An Introcosm, titled after the concept of an inner universe presented in both Julian Jaynes’ 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness, and David Lewis-Williams’ 2002 archaeological text The Mind in The Cave. Interested in the application of this concept in both a psychological context, and as a way of decoding, and interpreting Paleolithic cave painting, Eyckermans seeks to create works in which abstract feelings and metaphor coalesce with tangible fragments of life. The figures within Eyckermans’ compositions become increasingly anonymous as they are heavily obscured by shadows that serve to highlight and exaggerate their individual gestures. Objects, occasionally banal in nature, are displaced into new environments and imbued with allegorical connotations. While at first, these theatrical spaces appear surreal in nature, they represent the flattening of real, architectural space with the mutable relationships and emotional states that inhabit them, into a static image, in which multiple perspectives exist within the same plane. Throughout, Eyckermans’ interest lies in utilising visual cues to translate these hyper-specific, often personal references into more universal narratives, encouraging the viewer to project their own connections, and associations onto the work’s internal logic.

Bendt Eyckermans (b. 1994) lives and works in Antwerp. In fall 2022, Eyckermans’ work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at TANK, Shanghai. Additionally, his work was included in the group exhibitions Lipstick and Gas Masks, M HKA, Antwerp, 2021, and Fifteen Painters, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, 2021. Past solo exhibitions include Blue shadow, Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp, 2019, Yellow leaves, CARLOS/ISHIKAWA, London, 2019, A Stranger’s Hand, S.M.A.K., Ghent, 2018, among others. Eyckermans’ work is held in the permanent collection of M HKA, Antwerp.