Zilverspoor

Ronny Delrue

Drawing as a way of thinking

 

Visual artist Ronny Delrue (Heestert, Belgium, 1957) shows his recent drawings, paintings and sculptures in the Fontana gallery, which conceptually form one coherent installation. Delrue works and thinks like a draftsman, whatever medium he uses. For him, drawing is a way of thinking and searching, and the line is the carrier of an idea. It is also the most direct and shortest way to make the invisible visible. Even when he paints or makes sculptures, he does so like a draftsman.

 

The invisible that Ronny Delrue wants to capture in an image takes place in the thinking head. This steers his drawing hand in the ambition to evoke the tension between appearing and disappearing, between remembering and forgetting. This is done in a socially topical way in Sculptures of Stones. In these paintings he reflects on the polemical question of what to do with the statues of rulers from the colonial past with blood on their hands. Do we remove the images from their plinth and erase our past or do we place the images in a new, critical context?

 

The tension between disappearing and appearing takes on a poetic form in Protected Trees. The trees, or what remains of them, have been placed in a bell jar as a symbol of an endangered and therefore disappearing nature. As if they have become a museum piece. At the same time, the bell jar protects against further contamination that is visible on the glass as black snow. Like the perforated portraits in the exhibition, the bell jars are a monument to remembering, in the fight against what should not be forgotten.

 

The exhibition can be read as a 'Mindscape', a landscape that takes place in the head. And that also applies when it comes to a portrait. Because with Ronny Delrue the portrait is also a mental landscape.

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Thursday 12 May – Saturday 11 June 2022

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