Boy & Erik Stappaerts
Between allegory and user-friendly virtual communities. The work of Boy & Erik Stappaerts
Those who have followed the artistic
practice and agenda of Boy & Erik Stappaerts may detect an almost
theological commitment the artist nurtures towards the confrontation between
his material body of work and its systematic catapultation into a virtually
created environment. As a
conceptual continuation of his previous exhibitions, the current one displays
the usual enigmatic suspects: a series of paintings, a sculptural work, several
drawings bonded to a patterned surface, an office desk. On closer inspection,
the paintings reveal themselves as conflict paintings, the sculptural object as le
pact des loups, the
patterned surface as background, the office desk as Pentagronium registration desk. All objects are virtually
converted into their avatars, which are subsequently subjected to inspection,
transformation and manipulation by the users of the Pentagronium program, the digital databank
containing all of the above mentioned avatars.
Strangely, this arrangement creates
the impression of having just stepped in an exclusive club, which by definition
may generate in the spectator a kind of shyness, particularly at odds with vulcanizing the ambitious social interaction
the program focuses on. This is partly due to the polysemic, mysterious beauty
of the objects, suspiciously echoing nostalgia for the doctrine of late
modernism. Such nostalgia, however, does not constitute the core principle
governing the enterprise. There’s too much digital interference from the side
of the Pentagronium and the term “principle” itself would point to an overtly rationalistic
endeavor, one which is not very loved by contemporary artists - Boy & Erik Stappaerts being no
exception in this sense.
It is rather an impulse, an
“allegorical impulse” as Craig Owens would put it, which traverses his practice
and transforms the gathered elements into figures that convey meanings other
than the literal ones and appeal to the spectator’s imagination, rather than to
his/her reason. Le pact des loups silently stands for a psychological situation
sublimated into an architectural object that also resonates with the carefully
designed spaces populating his drawings. Similar sublimations are to be found
within Room 5, the reception area
of the Pentagronium, namely pieces that were exhibited in previous years and now reappear
in their virtual bodies only. The allegorical work, in the language of contemporary art, points
towards a synthetic, eclectic one, gathering diverse media and is marked by a penchant
towards discursivity. Similarly, Boy & Erik Stappaerts works in the media
of painting, sculpture, drawing, software/internet and the homepage of the Pentagronium.org is packed with his subjectivist
critical vocabulary. One is immediately invited to get familiar with labyrinths,
dance floors, explosions, conflict-landscapes, work-consoles or backgrounds to name just a few. This kind of discursivity
manifests a preference for allegory and symbol rather than classical narration,
even though a good deal of his work is based on private stories, filtered
through his personal art historical consciousness, aesthetic preferences and subversive
instincts. All exhibited objects breath anti-theatrical aesthetics, whose
origins may be traced to Ingres or Gustave Moreau, who also preferred to
replace the dramatic pose of figures with immobility and allegorization. Such a
rejection of the narrative is accompanied by a complete indifference towards
the figurative. This may seem surprising, considering the tradition against
which the conflict paintings take a stance.
Boy & Erik Stappaerts baptized his conflict
paintings after one
of the most venerable genres in art treatises: the history painting. What looks
like a stylish formalist exercise, that would have gained praise from a figure
like Greenberg, is actually much more connected to the classical era of history
painting, with its focus on representing a multiplicity of scenes from a
religious, mythological or historical story and the emphasis on a single
dramatic moment that required a skillful assimilation of figurative conventions
on the part of the artist. The key principle of this genre consisted in
representing “the passions of man”, the academic formula stating : “a picture
should be considered as a stage on which each figure plays its role”. Charles
Le Brun famously theorized such mise-en-scène and codified these passions, giving the rules
for a long-lasting tradition in pictorial theatricality. Obviously, Boy &
Erik Stappaerts has all justification to be indifferent to such time-honored
rules, but this doesn’t cancel out the fascination for picturing that dramatic
moment, the conflict, by the use of color modulations precisely applied in their place
within the economy of the layering. The perfectly polished paintings bear no
expressionistic touch and leave no space for imperfection or viscerality. They
witness a battle, between the mental world informing the painting and the flat
pictorial quality of the surface. They marry a neoclassical-derived concept of
ideal beauty to romantic subjective mysticism.
Turning
to romanticism, the polymorphously perverted one that informs Boy & Erik
Stappaerts’s work is rather striking. Perverted, because today’s art context is far too diverse
and fragmented in order to allow the rebirth of genuinely totalistic projects,
perverted nonetheless because the artist himself exposes his entire body of
work to a virtual environment where all permutations will be possible and where
the original romantic input inscribed in the works themselves will be ignored
or mystified. There is, however, another dimension of romanticism to be
mentioned: the previous project that has become part of the Pentagronium, namely B.E.S Institute and
Associations, aimed at reconsidering classical museology, the artist giving
his/her virtual spectator the possibility to configure an individual museum,
each according to his/her own selection or display tastes. This implies that
the artist sees himself as a legislator, and it is through the transforming act
of his imagination, important for itself, not for any moral or aesthetic
reason, that he legitimizes his museological project.
Organically, this legislating interest
is carried on in the Pentagronium database, a digital platform in the recent
tradition of user-friendly social internet-based networks. Questioning
authority in the realm of the consumerist society is at stake, since Boy &
Erik Stappaerts displays his objects and backgrounds in a desire to facilitate sharing
artistic/cultural goods in a parallel market that will be governed by the users
themselves. Technology is not important in itself, but it becomes appealing to
see what the results are when technology gets internalized and humanized.
Maximizing the liberty of individuals, while minimizing the power of authority,
is a feature much linked to the doctrine of libertarian socialism, but the work remains critically
unimaginative enough to insist on such affiliation. Although the artist’s Pentagronium echoes the paradigm of the art as a
means to the end of social transformation, as initiated by early 19th
century utopian socialists, like Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, the
continuous reinvention of the - by now canonized “culture industry”- invites a
much more detailed discussion on the specificity of his program, that functions
at once as public archive and production company.
All in all, Boy & Erik Stappaerts’s work, as visible in
the current exhibition too, is marked by a tension between the radical
particularity of individual artistic existence and its display and abandonment
of the mass consumption market, for the sake of a virtual one.
Silvia Făgărăşan