STATEMENT

Stijn Cole is a multidisciplinary artist based in Ghent, Belgium. Cole’s practice draws on the relationship between the subject and its natural environment. Through a process that layers analog and digital art forms, Cole often works with the fluctuating impact of time and light on sections of a specific landscape. In combining these altered states of nature in single compositions, Cole speaks of intangible and expansive phenomena confronted by subjective and limited viewpoints.

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The relation between the object and its surroundings is central in Stijn Cole’s work. Light, not the medium, is crucial here, since the way we experience color and form is to a great extent determined by the intensity of the light they are subjected to. Stijn Cole is constantly bringing this knowledge into play when creating his installations and other works. He always reduces his images to their purest essence. His choice of media is eclectic: there’s video as well as sculpture, painting and mixed media, photography, and graphics and besides abstract work, he also creates figurative art. And yet his oeuvre demonstrates great coherence.

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In Stijn Cole’s universe, themes like time and landscape painting are endowed with a renewed beauty that translates into a contemporary version of impressionism. Each new series of Stijn Cole’s works is connected with a specific period, walk, or journey, which gives it an almost documentary quality. Stijn Cole describes his contribution as modest, just a filter he puts on reality. But with the utmost precision and subtlety, he challenges the viewer to take on an active role. In this manipulative game, he entices the viewer to engage in an experience of intensity, space, and shape that will time and time again prove to be surprising. His newest works increasingly take the shape of installations, landscapes created by Stijn Cole that the audience is invited to wander around in.

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