Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gent, België

Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck lives and works in Brussels, where he has developed his career through international exhibitions over the past ten years. His work consists of sculptures, installations, video work, photography, animated films, drawings, paintings and writing (short stories). It is his quest for the most effective way of presenting the concrete contents of each work that determines the medium that the artist ultimately selects. The scale can vary from the size of a small watercolour to a large, three-dimensional installation of 300m2.

The artist not only uses a very wide variety of media, but also deliberately employs a diversity of aesthetic forms, ranging from an economical, minimalist visual language to overloaded, exaggerated designs, always with the aim of articulating the content of the work as precisely as possible.

Thematically, the work concentrates on our laborious and problematic relationship with time, space and each other. Op de Beeck shows the viewer non-existent, but identifiable places, moments and characters that appear to have been taken from contemporary everyday life, aiming thereby to capture in his images the tragicomic absurdity of our postmodern existence. Key themes are the disappearance of distances, the disembodiment of the individual and the abstraction of time that have resulted from globalisation and the changes to our living environment that developments in media, automation and technology have brought about.

Hans Op de Beeck sometimes calls his works “proposals”; they are irrefutably fictional, constructed and staged, leaving it up to the viewer whether to take the work seriously, as a sort of parallel reality, or immediately to put it into perspective, as no more than a visual construct. His work is nourished by a keen interest in social and cultural reflection. The artist also questions the difficult relationship between reality and representation, between what we see and what we want to believe, between what is and what we create for ourselves in order to make it easier to deal with our own insignificance and lack of identity. The visual output of that investigation often produces slumbering, insidious, melancholy and astonishing images.

Celebration – a video by Hans Op de Beeck 2008

In harsh desert surroundings, with rocks and cactuses in the background, a wedding or some kind of celebration is taking place. It is blisteringly hot.

The camera is mounted on a tripod. The scene is a tableau vivant: a living painting in which neither the view nor the picture frame changes. The video offers the viewer a frontal view of a long, festively laid table, with a line-up of seven waiters and two chefs in immaculate white uniforms. Beside the table, to the right, two young waitresses stand with trays of glasses and appetizers.
A gentle wind ruffles the clothing and the tablecloth. The waiters and chefs are very different in terms of appearance and age, from young to old, fat to slim. They are all poised motionless, staring aimlessly in the direction of the viewer. In front of them, an over-the-top, baroque still life of food is displayed on dishes, on stands and under silver lids. Everything, from food to flowers, is beautifully arranged. On the left, in the foreground, a portly, older man in a suit is having a nap on a chair.

The video has no pronounced narrative line. The heat, the wilting food and the decoration already reveal the vacuum that will be left behind after the feast, and so undermine what should be a memorable moment. The staged scene of the feast looks awkward and foolish in comparison with the impressive, timeless landscape in the background.
The surface image of chefs and waiters, food, heat and landscape also contains the vacuum and the tragedy of an uninspiring failure of a feast, showing how we celebrate our own mortality with such rituals.

2008 – full HD video transferred to Blu-Ray disc, colour, sound
4 minutes, 38 seconds (16:9 aspect ratio)
Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano – Beijing – Le Moulin; Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Galerie Ron Mandos, Rotterdam – Amsterdam.