Rinus Van de Velde: Dear David Johnson, at Monique Meloche Gallery Chicago
His 1st exhibition in Chicago, Belgian artist Rinus Van de Velde exhibits 12 new, mostly large-scale drawings combined with hand-written text to create a complete environment both in the gallery and “on the wall” – our ongoing public art series.
Van de Velde’s masterfully drawn Siberian charcoal drawings are loosely inspired by photographic images culled from various sources, but paired with the artist’s words personally scribed on the gallery walls, they create open-ended narratives for the viewer to interpret. The exhibition, titled Dear David Johnson, is the next chapter of the larger story Rinus Van de Velde tells in his work. Each show further develops and adds to the artist’s fabricated autobiography. In this case, the wall texts are excerpted from a letter the artist wrote to imagined curator David Johnson, explaining why he missed their scheduled meeting. Van de Velde’s work blends truth and fantasy, creating a complex world in which documentation and fiction, reproduction and reconstruction intrinsically tie together. The personal mythologies he builds with his nostalgic drawings tap into our collective unconscious, allowing the viewer to glean a greater truth from the artist’s fictional realities.
