Publications CV & contact
Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp, 2023
awning systems, textile, motors
various dimensions
Awnings fold themselves to the whims of their capricious user, who rolls them out depending on how they wish to modulate the light. Sometimes it is sunny outside, then again cloudy. Indoors it need be neither sunny nor cloudy; indoors, control prevails.
The work Sunsetter behaves like a perpetuum mobile, following its own logic, indifferent to any functional purpose. Leon Vranken’s awnings do not keep out sunlight and do not optimize the environment. The expected window that usually accompanies an awning is absent; the awnings themselves capture the gaze. Through their multiplicity and their randomness, they resemble the unpredictable weather itself, which can neither be directed nor controlled. By hanging such a utilitarian object—normally situated at the boundary between inside and outside—on an immaculate gallery wall, Vranken blurs that porous dividing line.
With Some stones are rocks and some rocks are clouds, made from doormats from which he removed the bristles, Vranken sharpens his focus on the small rituals that take place in the transition zone between inside and outside. The stones that Vranken wove into the remaining mesh are disproportionately large compared to the sand that usually clings to a mat. Moreover, the mats hang vertically on the wall; like Sunsetter, they ask for a gaze that would otherwise pass such objects by without a second thought.
Where he previously intervened on a grand scale—for example, when he broke open the floor and ceiling of Z33 to install a fountain—he now brings the outside world indoors in a more subtle manner. Other objects and materials also shed their former function at the doorway and are absorbed into Vranken’s universe of craftsmanship and refined aesthetics. His assisted readymades do not readily betray their industrial origins. The artist challenges expectations; the gaze is a muscle that must be trained.
Vranken’s artistic curiosity extends to a multiplicity of materials, colours, and techniques that sometimes cross his path almost by chance. Thus there is the old awning fabric that he immediately embraced as raw material for Partly Cloudy (II). Every addition is a delicate matter for him; he cherishes the history carried by the fabric and treats the gradual discoloration caused by years of exposure to light with the care of a conservator. The initially discarded awning fabric thus once again smuggles influences from outside to inside.
Protection against the elements also returns in the work Gum, for which he made the canvas from rubber roofing material. The viewer blinks and once again recognizes an object that has found its way from outside—where it served a protective function—to the interior. The same applies to Doublers: from a stone he made a replica out of insulation material, over which he then stretched a saddle cover.
Stretch, relax also tinkers with a set of undefined rules that separate inside from outside. A camping chair injects a sense of domesticity into a context that seeks precisely the opposite. Vranken stretches this contrast—intrinsic to the object—not only by elongating the chair itself into an unusual four-seater with gaps, but also by allowing it to merge into an environment that breathes a more sterile kind of adventure.
Vranken turns the principles of inside and outside inside out, blurring them into a new logic that reveals itself to the attentive gaze.
Text by Anneleen van Kuyck
Sunsetter, 2023 (sped up)
awning systems, textile, motors
various dimensions
awning systems, textile, motors
various dimensions
Some stones are rocks and some rocks are clouds, 2023
steel wire frames, pebbles
226 x 146 x 6 cm
steel wire frames, pebbles
226 x 146 x 6 cm
detail
installation View