PRELUDE, 2020

Trained as an engineer and architect, with an extended experience of working in the fashion world, Karel Burssens understands the delicate economies of desire and how they manifest in the material world. His sensitivity to our impulses and biases come through in his conceptually-driven practice, which uses the iconography of the everyday to wage war against the tautologies that structure it. There is a propositional quality that pervades the sculptures on view for Burssens’ inaugural show. Operating not unlike the scientific method, each work seems to introduce a hypothesis that it then battles against. There are carefully accounted for variables and constants that structure each model-like composition; their tension is what gives the work its satirical bite. 

Eyes are a recurring and unnerving pattern in Burssens’ newest sculptures. Working with a prosthetic lab to recreate the irises of world leaders and his own, Burssens turns the viewing experience on its head. You stare at the work and it glares back. In part a nod to Burssens’ own observant and exacting mode, the glassy eyeballs that are embedded into opaque sheets become an entry point for questioning the circumambient logic of the male gaze and its insidiously invisible place in our lives. While instantly recognisable in its parts, Burssens’ work manages to eschew our expectations. The doors that allow one to enter the work are not the ones you exit through. The artist’s deft tweaks to context, scale and finish dismantle our assurances. What we are left with is a renewed urgency to critically examine the structures around us and the passive and active roles we assume within them. 

Curated by Goedele Bartholomeeusen

17 October- 21 November 2020
Philippe Piessens
Begijnenvest 102
2000 Antwerpen

Pictures by Jeroen Verrecht