2007
Tinus VermeerschLike an astonished explorer, Tinus Vermeersch creates a bizarre world populated by strange animals and peculiar figures in his drawings and sculptures. Due to there size, use of colour, manner of presentation, and the artist's signature, the drawings are a lot like typical popular prints from the 16th or 17th century. What's portrayed is much more difficult to pinpoint: creatures that look like small monsters could also be figures with ritual masks; sand dunes appear to change into living things; cube-shaped monoliths pop up in wild landscapes; peculiar figures wield a stick like a ritual object or to defy the elements...
With his work , the artist appears to want to capture something that he actually doesn't understand, something that exists outside our own environement and for wich imagery still hasn't been developed. In his way of looking at the unknown, Tinus Vermeersch very conciously uses a western gaze, as if he is the first and only person that has discovered a new world. The awkwardness that accompanies this gives the drawings a mysterious and unworldly character. The size confirms the uncertainty with wich the artist deals with the unusual: it isn't a rhetorical or accurate representatation of reality; he's attempting to grasp certain things via small 'sketches'. Imagination arises out of this incomprehension of events.
Although clear relationships exist between the drawings themselves, they don't tell a story or act as illustrations. Their value lies on another level: the tension that arises between the artificial elements and the dramatic or ominous depiction of the landscape and clouds makes the drawings so strange and special. From the area of tension, a feeling of uneasiness arises when we discover Tinus Vermeersch's world. The figures also receive a much more complex meaning than if they were merely a continuance of mediaeval grotesque illustrations.
The figures' indefinable actions recur frequently: the apparent meaninglessness of their actions makes them humorous. That humour becomes poignant and existentialistically tinted when one sees more of Tinus Vermeersch's work. In his recent sculptures, he continues the imagery that he has developed in his drawings. Some of them become three-dimensional miniature landscapes in which human creatures are present. Their meaning or role within the entity remains open and impervious. The further one penetrates and gets lost in Tinus Vermeersch's world, the more one is confronted with the many possible interpretations. The pleasure of looking at his work becomes so intense that it becomes a compelling and enduring visual experience.
Tanguy Eeckhout
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