Born in 1958 in Brussels (BE)
Lives and works in Brussels (BE)
2000
Lamp with mirror, editing console, program floppy disc
Dimensions variables
Year of Purchase: 2000
‘I want to comment on limits, also on those between nothing and much, between nothing and everything.’1
Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s work began in the late 1980s and yet there are few photographic traces of her output. Refusing untimely publications and most of all pointless commentaries, her pieces are self-sufficient, being at once production protocols and presentation texts.
‘_FAUX SOLEIL_ spots of moving light. a luminous shadow. an imitation: the artificial, reconstituted reproduction of the movement of a sunspot in a room, a passageway, a stairwell, the spot evolves, waxes and wanes, it is now geometrical, now shapeless. it changes tint and luminescence, its contours are sometimes very sharp, sometimes more blurred. all these movements are recorded and orchestrated by a computer system. speed of movements: here, several possibilities: solar speed x 1, or solar speed x 2, or solar speed x 3, or solar speed x 10, etc.’
Poles apart from any authoritarian proposition taking ‘its place’ in the space, the light projections of FAUX SOLEIL work round the shapes of the objects they encounter. They are the illusion, the fictive traces of sunbeams caressing the surfaces of a room, changing shape and size in almost unforeseeable ways.
With great economy of means, these solar patterns composed by the artist render the rhythms of accelerated time. They invite us to experience duration and give physical presence to the time of light. With reference to a certain tradition of art history – from Baroque painting to the Impressionists, and up to the photographic recording of the sun’s effects in a studio by Jan Dibbets2 – the work of Joëlle Tuerlinckx is a troublemaker.
From the confetti deposits to the paper pellets and taking in the dotted chalk lines, the enigmatic crossed-out words and shaded forms of small pieces of adhesive, these ‘little nothings’ are part of the vocabulary of an unfinished work with frail but nonetheless determined accents. A kind of ‘minimal intuitive’, the artist builds up an ephemeral œuvre and gets back to basics, to the most precise perceptions of the moment, of experience, to open up space and gradually organize the void.
Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s art is not a response and under no circumstances can it set things in stone. Rather it sets out facts, thoughts, doubts and questions. This is how it deploys a continuous system of variations among the possibilities envisaged and actual productions. Whether it be preparatory or documentary works, installations, videos or projections, Joëlle Tuerlinckx bases her thinking on the image and the word, space and thought, the exhibition and the book.
Béatrice Josse
1 Jan Dibbets, Inside the Visible, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996.
2 The shadows in my studio as they were at 27.07.1969 from 8.40-14.10 photographed every ten minutes, 1969.