Kasper De Vos  1988° Antwerp.
Living and working in Ghent Belgium

[email protected]
Coupure Links 423, 9000 Gent
0032484275396

[email protected]

—Kasper De Vos 2017

One project at a time, Kasper De Vos investigates how one moves from singularity to duality. Rarely in his practice does this duality quite reach multiplicity. Two is the magic number – like in a fairy tale or a dream (pairing the slipper, reuniting estranged lovers). The artist’s binomic algorithm allows him to picture intimacy while hinting at larger forces that, when they work, hold things – us and society – together.

Take the walnuts De Vos produced for the exhibition Prelude: Melancholy of the Future at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in 2020. They came in two versions: a single large brown plaster nut, resting on a folded blanket and placed on a wooden stand; and a series of life-size bronze moulds of real walnuts, placed within their original shells and held together with coloured elastic bands. Each version could be divided in two – like the human brain, said the artist. The larger nut one was hollow; each of the full smaller ones unique. The two versions, inextri- cably linked, speak to De Vos’ ability to combine big and small.

Through big and small, De Vos addresses fundamental
social questions. For De Vos they revolve around hospitality and shared experience. What, in other words, constitutes a community? In 2019, the artist opened Eigen Klei, a sidewalk market stall selling bits of used clay in various shapes and sizes, including ‘Oost-Vlaamse Fijne Korrel’ (white, powdery cement), ‘Luikse Worst’ (brown, tube-like casts) and ‘Antwerpse Grof’ (rubble). Next to this assortment of sculptural leftovers, dis- played as fresh produce, De Vos was seen standing like a grocer, looking out for potential customers.

As the names of the various ‘specialties’ in Eigen Klei suggest, food allows De Vos to map the distinctive cultural geography of Belgium while connecting it to other international culinary tra- ditions. Fractured between all manner of linguistic and political borders, Belgium can at least agree on its edible heritage: beer, fries, mussels, waffles, cheese, and mayonnaise. When De Vos installs a magnificently large ceramic painted meatball on a white plastic garden chair (Cerameat Lover, 2018), he positions a Belgian staple on a ubiquitous modest throne. This royalty combines high and low (social classes, taste) through the figure of the meatball, a near-universal preparation.

From the circular economy of Eigen Klei to Cerameat Lover, the circle returns, again and again. In Fighting For World Cheese, the artist creates a cheesy visual pun with near-serious implications. The uniting function of cheese in Belgium is real (the ‘boterham’ is akin to a national anthem), yet this identification is riddled with holes, just as the country is defined by lack – of a coherent national and linguistic identity, of a national museum of contemporary art, etc. The yellow in Fighting For World Cheese points to the Flemish flag’s dis- tinctive yellow background. The artist seems to be punching

holes in nationalist agendas, reminding us that cheese, like the meatball, is a transborder staple enjoyed by diverse cultures, regardless of background.

Claes Oldenburg’s 1961 Store, and his many enlarged sculp- tures of food, come to mind. Unlike Oldenburg, however,
De Vos’ food-related works avoid the grand gestures of Sculpture, with its proud placement of monumental objects in public spaces. If De Vos makes mainly sculpture, it is lower-case, as a means of setting up a framework of exchange where a self-depreciating civic lesson can be shared. De Vos’ sculpture is thus social, since it reflects on what binds us.
Yet unlike Rirkrit Tiravanija’s relational situations, De Vos’ social sculpture does not need to carry out the commonality it evokes. The Eigen Klei market is conceptual and actual, but more the former than the latter. Who would buy a kilo of rub- ble? The piece’s utopic impulse invites the individual to think, and potentially act, besides her/himself.

Nowhere does De Vos seem to reverse the transcendence of Sculpture more effectively than in Belgian Sunset (2017), a large video projection of a circular vat of boiling fries. Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003) transformed the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London into a glowing cathedral, illuminated by a towering halo of orange light. Visitors

would lie on the museum’s floor for hours, awe-struck by the sublime monument – itself a re-interpretation of Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural interventions. De Vos stands clear of these magisterial gestures, preferring the humble, yet no less inspiring, fried potato, which Belgians regard with something close to veneration. De Vos’ video is undoubtedly funny, but like the cheese flag, it moves us to observe the more essential and greasy interface between a modest edible and a national symbol.

Like Marcel Broodthaers, another food-inclined Belgian,
De Vos’ has set his sights on eggs. But De Vos’ eggs are mostly full, as opposed to Broodthaers’ brittle shells. As he did with nuts, De Vos’ eggs come in at least two versions, one big (Spin- ning the self, 2018) and a smaller edition (Het El van Ra). The plaster shells of this last version are divided into three equal parts, once again held together by elastic bands. The three-ness of Het El van Ra was inspired by a friend of the artist who showed him a walnut with an unusual three-part shell. This seeming aberration touched on the motor – uno, duo... – of De Vos’ oeuvre, summed up by the question: how to preserve the equality of two in the process of becoming a multiplicity?

De Vos’ answer to this riddle is the perfect circle that lies in- side the various protective parts, whether twos or threes. What connects the nut and the egg is their enclosure of an essential form of life in the making, rife with potentiality. And they both make for good food. Robert Filliou used to place a large egg shape at the centre of the Poïpoïdrome, a cosmological labyrinth he developed with Joachim Pfeufer in 1963.

The Poïpoïdrome took on different forms each time it was presented, acting as a modular ludic and ritual space, with always at its centre the form of a primordial egg.

De Vos’ eggs, cheese slices, clay sausages and frying potatoes borrow this sense of cosmic performativity, albeit grounded in the rubble of the real. At the heart of all things (including ourselves) lie holes, voids and other vacancies that exceed our drive to fill and complete. De Vos’ sculpture – with the same small ‘s’ as for ‘subject’ – honours the search for a better half. Yet his nuts, eggs and meatballs barely hold on. His sculptural practice rests on shaky grounds, where one is not enough and two remains a modest, inviting proposal for more.

—Antony Hudek, September–October 2021

In his studio, Kasper De Vos’ collages, drawings and sculptures built a colorful and rather uncanny environment where vibrant imaginary landscapes were deeply rooted down by everyday absurdities. A visual storyteller, De Vos utilizes serendipity, surprise and salvaged social remnants as key elements in his process. Materials and idea are gathered on the natural route of any given day, and classical sculptural forms (such as base, bust, and body) are incorporated into odd combinations of contemporary throwaways.  

 A bulk of his artistic production, including miniature utopian mock-ups and works on paper, are classified as studies for future sculptures. Everything is material for something else and these sculptures tend to be constructed from found and frequently perishable materials; leftovers that De Vos transforms to make humorous reflections on the awkward intersections between culture and consumerism.  Sandwiches become tables, plastic water bottle crates act as the base of temples, and raves are reduced to totemic systems (what de Vos called “Native Kitsch”) as elements from the artist’s environment are removed from their habitat and reassembled. Throughout his practice, De Vos flirts playfully with filth, cloaking serious social issues with a light hearted type of Trojan horse aesthetic where basic colors and forms carry questions about materials, motivations and social phenomena.  He is a sculptor who seems to want to give away an object’s secrets.

 As recurring elements in his daily routine, folklore and food play a significant role in his practice and the artist’s fascination with the latter goes beyond eating, leading him to activities like dumpster diving and selling vegetables every Friday in the market place. These experiences offered reminders that what we eat is usually coupled to what we buy and that while our dinner may speak to familiarity, folklore, pleasure and cultural pride, it also addresses economic and social contradictions like starvation and systemic overproduction that further contributes to mountains and mountains of waste.

 De Vos seems to have a lot of fun diving into those mountains and takes his lessons from the market to heart when he explains that “part of the work is clearly about selling food and how to present it.”

 —Harlan Levey, 2017

Kasper De Vos (°1988) verwierf bekendheid met installaties en sculpturale interventies die op een zowel humoristische als sculpturale manier verwezen naar het consumentisme en de daarmee verbonden eetcultuur. Concreet betekent dit dat hij naast de Gentse academie een hamburgertent opzette waar je oneetbare sculpturen kon kopen die leken op hamburgers en alle andere artikelen die op het menu staan in zo’n eetplek. Later bouwde hij in Antwerpen een echte pizzaoven waarboven een vlag neerhing die de vorm had van een plak goudgele gatenkaas. En in Knokke zette hij op de protserige Zeedijk een marktkraam op waar hij boetseerklei van eigen bodem verkocht. Soortgelijke verwarringen treffen we ook aan in zijn sculpturen, bijvoorbeeld een in het luchtledige hangende, geboetseerde arm die een zwarte vuilniszak lijkt te dragen. Of grote gipsen eieren naast een reusachtige eierdoos. Vaak worden in zijn sculpturen gevonden voorwerpen of materialen gecombineerd met geboetseerde elementen. Zijn sculpturen en installaties lijken voort te komen uit een soort van tactiel en visueel plezier, een spel van vormelijke en inhoudelijke associaties en een milde vorm van humor die de vorm aanneemt van een open, speelse, vindingrijke dans met materialen, technieken, dingen en gedachten. Zijn werk roept verhalen op zonder illustratief of belerend te zijn. Het is een soort van denken met vormen, dat ons op onze beurt aan het denken en dromen zet. Verrassend, inventief, genereus, plastisch, virtuoos, open en onirisch.

—Montagne de Miel, 9 juli 2021