“Basically”, the Belgian artist Philippe Van Snick (1946-2019) once told me, “my interest is in the agitation of matter”. Art, for Van Snick, was a way to address the inherent instability of systems, ideas and objects – the volatility of nature and human life. Chance upsets systems; sensuality upsets rationality. Beginning as an artist in the late 1960s, Van Snick combined an early interest in Marcel Duchamp and Surrealism with the radical questioning of the object of Minimal and Conceptual art. He turned to mathematics, studying structure, order, and relationship through elementary practices of counting, measuring, and enumerating. More specifically, he took the decimal system, the basis of the development of Western commerce and science, as his main tool to approach his personal experience and his life world by playfully deploying the numerical series from 0 to 9 as a principle of main command in pencil drawings. photographic series, serial objects and installations. Signal pins (Map Pins), 1974, consists of a linear arrangement of ten different groupings of ten pins on a wall: ten times the same, but ten times different. As one of the artist’s key works, it featured prominently in “Dynamic Project” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Ghent (SMAK), the first retrospective since the artist’s untimely death. The show demonstrated how he stayed true to his “open system” even as he constantly moved among materials and mediums.
The Jaqueline Martins gallery in Brussels provided a brief complement to the full exhibition in Ghent. The centerpiece of the exhibition was the installation Instability of the Fundamentals, 1990. In the stately first-floor room of the 19th-century bourgeois house into which the São Paulo-based gallery expanded in 2020, eight elementary wooden beams of varying sizes rested on pairs of trestles: Four of the beams were painted bright yellow, two black and two blue. In a manner similar to that of the first installment of the Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp in 1990, two identical rectangular blocks, one painted black, the other blue, stood parallel to the gallery windows. The other blocks had been used to generate a complex pathway for the viewer to navigate.
Instability of the Fundamentals marks a key moment in Van Snick’s work. At the beginning of the 1980s, he returned to painting, which he had abandoned at the end of his studies. In keeping with his decimal idiom, he devised a scheme consisting of ten colors: the primaries and secondaries, plus the non-colors white and black, and finally silver and gold. Rather than relying on the stark contrast between black and white, Van Snick advanced the semantic tension between black and blue – manifested in the difference between night and day – as the binary basis of his system. The domain that he thus opens up is not that of numbers and calculation but that of poetry and the ephemeral, a domain that he does not limit to pictorial space but extends to real space. from the gallery.
Instability of the Fundamentals illustrates the hybrid and protean work generated by this system. The work resembles a studio setup, as if the blocks rest on trestles while their paint dries. Since the work uses only three of the colors in Van Snick’s scheme, one would assume that it displays an intermediate state of production. The foundations are there, but they are not yet solidly anchored. Any work of art, Van Snick suggests, is only a transient and therefore decidedly unstable expression of underlying principles. Art and artistic creation are just as unstable and restless as the world in which they participate.
