Luc Lambrecht – Jeroen Frateur’s Artistic Production (en)

thoughts on how found rejects generate a new visual world

An artist that abundantly uses the torrent of overconsumption, the mountains of unusable/unmarketable waste and rejects, is able to make a firm statement—via the detour of art—on how the (Western) world deploys things in a never ending maelstrom of (circular) production and ditto extravagance.

Today recycling has become a fashionable concept that has fallen prey to, and like anything else, has itself been recycled by the (so-called) new economy, which in this post-industrial era provides a way out to transform as such ecological intentions into a profitable economic activity like any other. But since the “golden sixties”, artists have been using the “waste” of the madness of merciless consumption—the residue of “our” rampant urge to consume, which is fuelled by shrewd advertising in PR campaigns. The artistic roots of picking up waste material can be found in Dadaism, namely in the genuine aesthetization of and composing with the “banned” rejects of consumption in strong, albeit purely aesthetically oriented assemblages by artists such as Kurt Schwitters. In the 1940s and 1950s other artists followed, such as Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, César, Arman or Daniel Spoerri, who either on the basis of a traceable formula and method or otherwise, as it were “contained and combined” waste material in autonomous objects—art objects—that thus acquired a speculative value. Today artists such as Jessica Stockholder, Peter Buggenhout and Pascal Marthine Tayou (to name just a few) are trendsetting, eminent artists that keep the same intent alive with great verve within the colourful gamut of contemporary art production.

Preparing this text on Jeroen Frateur’s work, I had to think back of the work of the Antwerp artist Frank F. Castelyns (born 1942), who held a very special and authentic position in these parts of the world, because in various places of his home town he had secret depots where he stored everything he found in the streets. These depots were his warehouses/arsenals, from which he chose objects to create often politically tainted assemblages in the vein of Dada, and which in fact prefigure the recent work of the German artist Isa Genzken, whose work, too, evolved from a modernist inspired visual language towards a “free” manner of sculptural “installing”. Castelyns continued to work under the radar of the official art world and market. Today, it is the art market that determines who gets “public” attention and that takes credit (and collects the cash). Artists such as Castelyns and Frateur engage in creating a coherent oeuvre and in their creative urge they pay little attention to the commercial circuit. That means their work is not often on view and does not play a part in the traditional circuit.

Jeroen Frateur’s art is entangled with the art historical traditions mentioned above, though his work has more to do with composition and it obviously challenges a definition/status that hesitates between sculpture and installation. Frateur’s artistic “production” is characterized by a visible, ingenious layeredness with regard to the materials it is composed of. In the deliberate, meticulously composed shape he lets these materials swarm in a new structure—a new reality. Frateur’s at first sight “unstable” sculptures consequently derive their “value” from the “in situ” concept, because presenting a work for example on the ceiling changes our perception, as the context of the presentation remains a priori an inherent part of the “global” work.

Frateur calls himself a “manual labourer”, a toiler whose point of departure is the “rejected” matter and who slowly lets the work grow from the shape itself. In this process of “genesis”, he lets himself drift on the energy of wonder, which to him is a mental companion that keeps him as an artist from working with preconceived ideas. “Pick up what has been left in the street,” is his motto and his creed in a world full of things that quickly turn into waste. The act of “picking up” in public places that which has been rejected goes hand in hand with a passion for the extraordinary beauty of this refuse. Sometimes things are made—for example wrapping material—that are designed very ingeniously for a particular purpose, only to be thrown away right after they have served this purpose. It is these sort of reflections that urge Frateur to appropriate these “liquidated” materials, which he uses to compose things we have never seen before—works of art—and which originate in Frateur’s case from a creative process that gets stuck in an art that could not be foreseen or expected.

In a small church in the Flemish village of Mullem, Frateur’s works is on view. In this specific context, it looks like an altar—an art sign that has exorcizing powers, the exteriorization of an almost “shamanist” practice. Assembling is composing. There is obviously “something” musical in Frateur’s work. The layers of wood, plastic, shabby objects and dangling, useless things are fixed in a structure. The chaos of found rubbish is as it were forced into a musical score. The musicality of this particular work was also visible in earlier works, in which the plinth consisted of almost raw, minimal piles of pallets, with here and there a tender eyeing layer of colour on a board. The pile as a point of departure for a plinth, in which the shapes announce themselves as “fantastic” implements that are or are not lighted from the “inside”, evokes multiple interpretations. Hot piles of materials that are kept together in a homogeneous way, allude to the element of time, like the slow process of sedimentation that causes rock to form.

Frateur creates works that are almost literally viewing machines. Aptly assembled shapes that function as an impulse for the imagination and that become “poetry” in their visual impasse. These works are the subject of an aesthetic question. They are loaded with discarded matter and unload themselves with an aesthetic product in which time generates a final shape that turns the quest for meaning into a subject of topical interest.

How Frateur’s artistic production relates to the background of the current cultural climate, is a question that results in reflections that turns our contemplation of this work into a contemporary issue. Refusing as an artist to participate in the whims of fashion, results in a position that has time as its ally.

Luk Lambrecht
June 2015