Rinus Van de Velde Author

Rinus Van de Velde (born 1983) lives and works in Antwerp. His practice mainly consists of drawings that hearken back to a personal archive of photographs derived from vulgarising scientific magazines such as National Geographic, from biographies of artists and scientists… Lately, he often re-enacts found footage or even stages non-existent scenes in photographs, which he then uses as source material. Van de Velde’s overtly narrative drawings are confronted with texts in installations that tell a new and personal story. This fiction takes place in a mirror universe that is peopled by courageous alter egos and who serve as ideal representatives of the actual artist. At the same time, this drawn world is delineated by its own subjectivity: it can be nothing but a fantasy, a fiction, and so beyond its borders lies the great nothingness of the “real” world.

As such, Van de Velde moves through the borderland between system and unsystematic reality, between self and ideal, between the ordinal subdivisions of the I and the Other. His artistic practice is characterised by a personal desire for self-actualisation, control and structure, but also “shows” us something; namely, that fiction and reality need and even imply each other.