Wonder @ Kunst in Huis

Once again, Kunst in Huis is giving one of their artists the chance to occupy the showcase and the Kortrijk branch. With this exhibition, the artist offers a glimpse of his or her future and plays with image, form and materials.

This year it is Casper Boone (born 1998 in Wilrijk, lives and works in Brussels). He graduated in the summer of 2023 as Master of Free Arts at LUCA School of Arts in Ghent. He experiments with different media - drawings, sculptures and paintings - in which he confronts and combines concrete, recognisable images with spontaneous inner feelings and memories. He presents his drawings and paintings on metal structures. This allows them to literally step out of their two dimensions, occupy space and acquire space around them. This gives Casper the opportunity to play with texts and images, to hang them in different perspectives in relation to each other and to create unexpected connections between words and images.

Clusters of images
He hangs the large sheets of paper on which Casper paints and draws from metal structures reminiscent of oversized laundry racks or banner stands. This allows him to use not only the front, but also the back of paper and canvas. Often there is an image on one side - drawings in wax crayons, paintings on calendar sheets, silkscreen prints of graphic logos and stencilled figures, sheets of paper that have been worked in such a way that holes have fallen into them that become faces. Sometimes there are also texts drawn on the picture side. You can often read a question on the other side of sheet or canvas, with nonchalant letters applied in pencil.

Do you know?
What did you eat last Tuesday? Is tomorrow the manifestation of today? Do we share our material or immaterial world? When does a memory become history? What is the requirement to become history? Is an olive related to the grape? If an individual describes a work of art, does the description become a work of art? Are we really that smart? Could a human be related to an olive? Is it a gift that we can be stupid? When does an illusion become reality? If we evolved from a fish to a human, can we also change back into a fish? The now is tomorrow's past, can you change the past today?

Fluid zone
Casper is fascinated by the observation that the so-called reality we observe is extremely fluid, ephemeral and fragmented due to our inner chaotic perception, and therefore hardly knowable. Therefore, he is in search of a visual language that can depict how the reality he observes is distorted and determined by the confrontation with inner conceptions, feelings and memories. In his work, he tries to give shape to this grey zone between reality and inner experience, between what "is" and what "is not", and between past and present.