born 1950 in Rotterdam/NL
lives and works in the South of France
personal site: http://vlesworks.monsite-orange.fr

BRAINSCAPES
Let’s first talk about your abarration, the worst possible kind in the realm of science: your deification of the brain. The brain and not the Code - a ridiculous mistake that only perfect ignorants can make. You idolize the servant and not the master; the creature and not its creator.
(Stanislav Lem: The Golem’s Inaugural Lecture in “Imaginary Magnitude” 1973)

The brainscapes series, started some years ago and by now grown quite out of hand (or should I say: out of head…?) should be perceived as a pictorial voyage around the human brain.

As the progress of neurobiological science in the last ten years has dramatically shattered our well-meaning illusions about rationality, and the developpement of nanotechnology will soon allow the merging of biological and artificial intelligence, the discussion about predetermination of human identity will become one of the most urgent topics of our century. In this context, “The Illustrated Man”, named in hommage to visionary science-fiction authors from Lem to Lessing to Bradbury, might be seen as the contemporary artistic incarnation of the robot sapiens that looks at us from out of the mirror.

The Lâmina series consist of abstract sculptural and mural pieces; wooden constructions covered with drawings, paintings, collages and writings, their overlapping forms inspired as much by the biological structure of the brain as by its “mental” expressions, their sober geometrical composition contrasting with the disorganized wealth of detail on the covering material, as the sober analytic faculties we attribute to the brain contrasts with the capriciousness of its actual manifestation.

In a more direct form, the works from the transCerebral series are a satirical comment on the ambiguous status of the human brain in our society. Far from being the simple instrument of logical deduction we believe it to be, it often acts as undercover agent of our primal instincts, deviously substituting rationality by rationalization - a sophistic deflection causing a lot of perfectly avoidable suffering and destruction to the human race and its environment.

The Krypta cycle refers to the language area of our brain and its memory and communication functions. Accordingly, it splits in two sub-sections.

The Wailing Wall project is a metaphor of verbal human memory. As recent analysis of our history books has shown, memory, even written memory, may often be erroneous, deliberately faked or incorrectly interpreted. But even so, the written (and thus more or less verifiable) form of remembrance is still the most important motor of human evolution.

“Taaltralies” is a Dutch word association meaning “language barriers” or “word fence”, contemplating the possibilities and pitfalls of verbal communication in our society.




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