Jan Vercruysse: Camera Oscura
May 23 - July 27, 2002

cam-era ob-scu-ra, \ n. [NL, lit., dark chamber] (1725) : a darkened enclosure having an aperture usu. provided with a lens through which light from external objects enters to form an upside-down image of the objects on the opposite surface.

If there is a sense of quiet and isolation within the compositions of Jan Vercruysse, it could be said that they are also viewed best when in that mood. As seen in both the objects and photographs the artist has produced over time, an emphasis has been placed on the suppression of any personal interaction with the works he creates. Instead, Vercruysse focuses on setting, using a personal style of anonymity which, as a pattern felt throughout his work, forces the various aspects of what one might see to flatten and loose their individual importance. This happens slowly through the use of repetition and non-chalance. The variations within the scenes Vercruysse creates can be as subtle as the changing light of day, and so these visual shifts are not always apparent at any one moment. Instead, they tend to lay beneath the veil of the picture's surface, waiting to be slowly discovered.

With this exhibition, a new set of allegories has been introduced. Moving beyond his earlier references to such subjects as Lucrecia, and the notion of Artist itself, Vercruysse has adopted icons of art, both creators, or more specifically performers, and that which is created. The compositions borrow ballerinas, tuba players, and even Josephine Baker, muse of Paris' Golden Age of Jazz. On a deeper level, art itself is represented: Duchamp's Bottle Rack, a princess from Velazquez's Las Meninas, a classical Italian Harlequin, and Alice (looking like she has somehow lost Wonderland).

In each of these pictures, the idea of the character appears true to itself, despite being plucked from its' original context. Additionally, each artistic allegory is accompanied by its strange doppelganger. In a play on the drawing technique used by some predecessors like Vermeer, Vercruysse has applied the visual effect of the Camera Obscura. An antique drawing tool, the Camera Obscura would reflect an image onto an artist's canvas, so that he might copy the reflected image, albeit upside down. However, Vercruysse has only inverted the figures from these scenes, not the entire scenes themselves. In a sense, this strips the second figures from any semblance of what they used to mean, for the inverted symbol, or opposite of a symbol, is to represent nothing at all. By coupling both together, the symbol and its negation, we are allowed to simultaneously be both the viewer and the viewed of these figures, to see sense and non-sense. What we are left with is not an underlying narrative, per se, but a delicately composed exploration of dissimilitude.