Jonas Vanderbeke : : Greetings from Jupiter

fri 03.06 - sun 17.07.2022

Studio23
Dublinstraat 35-006
9000 Gent
Telkens op zaterdag en zondag
van 14u tot 17u

website: www.studio23gent.com/exhibitions

Out of film, literature and the visual canon, Jonas distills images which used to represent beauty, still pass as such or are by now considered kitsch. He turns these into collages and paintings. Certain recurring motifs characterize his work; Symbols of transiency, for example. Flowers, heros and animals are recurring themes as well, but the composition doesn’t make it clear whether they open or close the space on the canvas.


These icons are displaced and disrupted. They lose their usual meaning and are disconnected. They no longer reference in the way they did before. They unleash a game, one that obscures and hides at the same time, makes old symbols unfamiliar or anew. Materiality, image and connotation start to contrast one another. The exuberant colors and images are immersed in a kind of darkness. It appears as if the work turns inwards, announces a later one or prepares for metamorphosis.


Out of the tension between graphic perfection and human imperfection, between a body and its cultus, craft and industry, new images arise time and time again. The beholder has to adjust its gaze each time. Jonas’s research is characterized by a sharp aestheticism that culminates in a celebration of the artificial, of a contrastful coherence, of painting that holds a mirror to itself.