Nœuds v/s plis

Wires, traces and folds, a philosophy of texture

Back at ODRADEK, Arlette Vermeiren and Niki Kokkinos are working outside of the large gap created by the concepts visible-invisible, empty-full, readable-illegible.

Offering a practice of tracing, marking and folding, the two artists open up, without any borders, unlimited fields of assemblies. Each walking down their own path, they never cease to intersect and multiply arrangements in multifaceted configurations. No longer seeking to “identify” by the figurative, they focus on the substrates they use. This happens gradually by reconciling the visible and the invisible. Thus, different graphic attributes give rise to a poetic writing which no one will attempt to decipher.

Arlette Vermeiren, committed to “doing” rather than to theory, has been immersed in the world of textile since her childhood. She has dedicated her life to making connections in both the literal and human sense. From her irrepressible gesture of gleaning and recovering, she collects everything that in her eyes shows a potential for assembly. She draws, spins, binds, knots, embroiders, prints or intertwines to show a path that allows her to reinvent a writing in which the sign is infinite. By the intermingling of her materials in networks or by her impressions on fabrics, we are invited to share with her a world of colours and lightness.

Niki Kokkinos, by means of a moving device for folding, imprints and markings, questions the pictorial surface. She uses a rhythm of random arrangements that allows her to leave room for the aleatory. Through the same device, the markings deliver, following the folding, both their interiority and externality. Thus folding, as a way of constructing space and defining the limits of the work, organizes an iteration and loss of landmarks.

For both artists, there’s no upside or downside, but an enrichment by “inter-texturality”.

Kiran Katara et Simone Schuiten, translation Renaat Beheydt