The fiction of Rinus Van de Velde (by Koen Sels)

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For the Belgian artist Rinus Van de Velde (b. 1983), drawing means imposing order on a stubborn reality. The point of departure for Van de Velde’s mythology, however, is not the “unprocessed” reality itself, but the staged world of photographic representation. His drawings, in fact, hearken back to a personal archive of photographs derived from vulgarizing scientific magazines such as National Geographic, from biographies of artists and scientists... These images serve as wellspring for a host of drawings, with as primary point of contact the recognizable form of the source material itself. What the photographs have in common, after all, is not so much what they show, but how they show it. The photographic sources may pretend to be perfectly natural images of a realistic state of affairs, but must in fact be seen as a conscious or unconscious arrangement of signs, brought into play as elements in an all-embracing narrative.


The form lying at the foundation of Van de Velde’s drawn world is that of the myth as a unique system of signs, as described by Roland Barthes in the theoretical section of Mythologies. According to Barthes, the myth arises “on the basis of an existing semiological chain: it is a semiological system in the second degree.” Within this meta-language, all sorts of signs are applied as sub-terms within a greater system, a given construct or ideology that is not explicitly illustrated, in which each element is placed in a specific light. A similar process takes place in Van de Velde’s act of appropriation by parasitizing upon the photographic image. By using the photograph as material for a drawing, and by providing – by means of text captions - a different context from that which is represented, Van de Velde lays aside the original facts in order to create space for a new and personal story. The goal, therefore, is not to make visible the reality “behind” the photograph, but to create a myth in the third degree. The contents are dismantled and discounted; only the form – the image language – remains the same.


In its seeming objectivity, that image language might be considered naïve by the contemporary viewer of ironic bent. That, of course, has to do primarily with the source material: the photographs Van de Velde collects are not critical of the medium of photography itself or of representation in general: they intend merely to stand for what they stand for, and are not characterized by assorted qualms about the medium. For a critical viewer, many of these photographs would be seen as intrusive bearers of a story which might often be found dubious, at the very least. Many of the photographs Van de Velde refers to, after all, are part and parcel of an ideology that is suspect or that hasn't stood up to the test of time (or of art): a deep-rooted belief in the myths of the authentic or autonomous artist, scientific progress, a paternalistic exoticism, a phallo-centrism marked by adulation of adventurers and other stalwart menfolk…

Van de Velde’s objective is not to unmask those myths: the photos unmask themselves enough as it is. His artistic practice is primarily a constructive one: by arranging drawings in nonlinear installations, linked by ambiguous and often incomplete textual references, it becomes possible to weave a new narrative, that suggests a whole world in which a number of recurrent characters live and move. In this way, out of a great number of scattered myths, an illusion of unity is created, which points both to the artist (who brings the images together) and to the viewer (who must ultimately dream up both the connections and a linear narrative). The result is a sort of ordered mirror universe, peopled by courageous alter egos who chart the world around them and serve as ideal representatives of the actual artist. At the same time, this drawn world is staked out and delineated by its own subjectivity: it can be nothing but a fantasy, a fiction, and so beyond its borders lies the great nothingness of the “real” world.


In essence, therefore, van de Velde moves through the borderland between system and reality, between self and ideal, between the ordinal subdivisions of the I and the Other. His artistic practice is characterized not only by a personal desire for self-actualization, control and structure, but also “shows” us something; namely, that fiction and reality need and even imply each other. Van de Velde’s necessary fictions serve to counter both a meaningless world and the totalistic myth, and so – in paradoxical fashion – are anchored in that “real” that cannot be related.


Koen Sels


Rinus Van de Velde is a postgraduate student at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. His work is currently exhibited at Tegenboschvanvreden in Amsterdam until 19 December.  www.tegenboschvanvreden.com