You do this. You do that. You touch this and you touch that. Your touch is gentle your touch is rude, your touch is weary it slips
it blooms. Your touch is real. Your touch is infinite.
When I close my eyes and I look inside I realize I am nothing. When I open my eyes and I look around I see that I am everything. Look at this scratch, look at that scar. Look at that stain crack the thing with a crowbar. Your inside hides outside. You are made of what you are not. Everything changes, it moves it shifts. Everything strikes, it hits it kicks; consequently inconsequent, constantly inconstant.
Everything is matter, everything matters. How much something fits into nothing?
This space is matter, it matters. The secret of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Maarten Van Roy (1985, Bonheiden, BE) is a sculptor. His work is marked by the adoption and cultivation of a wide range of materials, media and visual languages. It mediates an earthy spirituality, singing the praises of the superficial and yet receiving the echoes of what’s gone.
Van Roy’s objects transmit a passion for the emblematic. They address pop culture and music, nature, body culture and ephemeral effects. They are produced in his studio or in the open. As a surplus of the world he lives in, they are lost and found, as leftovers of everyday life, and carefully juxtaposed in the exhibition space. Van Roy is a spaceman. The architectural context in which they are presented is crucial. It stages them and enables their transgression: a shift from simple things and situations, devoid of meaning, to complex, emotionally fraught ones. There is a lot of physical intuition involved in the production of his work and exhibitions. As subtle arrangements in time and space, they require patience, endurance and confidence in the course of events ignited by the collision of his various fields of interest.
In his exhibition Windows at Les Brasseurs art contemporain, Van Roy stresses the street sided Glassbox as a physical intersection of everyday life and its repercussion in art: Liège’s Rue du Pont in front and the exhibition spaces behind. Preserving their self-referring nature, the objects on display assist to the reading and understanding of that intersection. They are signs and marks that wish to be noticed as little or as much as the blanks and specks between them, the lettering on the window Bar Cocktails chez Yolande or the sky above.
Maarten Van Roy lives and works in Cologne and Brussels. His work has recently been shown at Husslehof, Frankfurt am Main; Just Married, Los Angeles; MaximiliansForum, Munich; Simultanhalle, Cologne; Heimat, Antwerp; The Landing Strip, Berlin; Air Biennale, Paris; Bruch und Dallas, Cologne; Schmidt & Handrup, Berlin.
http://www.maartenvanroy.com
