RINUS VAN DE VELDE

The source materials for his ‘fictional autobiography’, as the artist told Kinfolk in 2018, range from his photographs and imagination to films, comic books, newspaper articles, and other media. Van de Velde has a propensity for projecting his own narratives onto existing images, in which he is often engaged in heroic and dramatic situations. In his solo exhibition at Antwerp’s Tim Van Laere Gallery in 2017, for example, he inserted his alter ego, Robert Rino, into the place of the Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s protagonist Tintin.

Primarily employing charcoal on canvas and coloured pencil on paper, Rinus Van de Velde creates naturalistically rendered scenes with bold strokes and atmospheric lighting. In his charcoal drawings, the contrast between black and white also heightens a sense of drama. Many of Van de Velde’s works are accompanied by a short text inscribed at the bottom, which evoke the style of newspaper cartoons.

Rinus Van de Velde’s life-size decors, which he builds out of cardboard and wood in his studio, amplify narrative possibilities. They have become part of his exhibitions, notably in Donogoo Tonka at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium (2016), where the artist displayed cardboard plants, a boat, and a pick-up truck alongside the drawings and paintings inspired by them. In revealing the background of his two-dimensional works as being artificial, Van de Velde intentionally confuses fiction and reality.

Over the years, Rinus Van de Velde has also ventured into film to convey his ongoing interest in the tension between fiction and nonfiction. The Villagers (2017–2019), for example, revolves around the residents of a small village set against a mountainous landscape—played by the artist, his friends, and colleagues—without a clear narrative structure. The buildings and interiors in the film are clearly constructed out of cardboard, yet Van de Velde’s use of sound effects convince the viewer into perceiving them as being part of the real world.

Further selected solo exhibitions include On Another Plane of Existence, Gallery Baton, Seoul (2020); The Colony, KWM artcenter, Beijing (2019); A Sunday as A Sunday, tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam (2016); and presentations at CAC Malaga, Spain (2013), and Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, the Netherlands (2012).

Rinus Van de Velde lives and works in Antwerp.

Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2020