Ruben Boeren

GANG_MAKER 9

Ruben Boeren, Das Wie des Malens

In our visual culture it is difficult to distinguish authentic from less authentic images, let alone make them. Images are provided by multiple owners and are never free from manipulations, making them ambiguous. Ruben Boeren is an artist who is looking for a new relationship to that ambiguity. Not as a cultural sociological problem. He just wants to make eye-catching ambiguous images.

Boeren’s drawings are a feast for the eyes. The eyes that constantly need to adjust, looking for symmetry and looking for what was initially imagined. But perhaps the imagination is not the origin, but the result of the image. And maybe the problem is not the image itself. Perhaps underlying, social and other network structures are at cause of not being able to separate images.

That's exactly what appears on the wall-filling charcoal drawings of Boeren. The entire act lies in exposing the structures and less in the figuration itself. The drawing process fills the image with multiple meaningful layers.

Boeren already encountered the limits of painting during his studies. First he had enough of 2D images. Then he stopped using color. But until today, Boeren continues to balance between semi-figuration and abstraction. An ambiguous condition we can suspect to be deliberately 'structural'.
His latest series of drawings shows shapes that appear to be naturally formed. The exhibition in the Warande is titled 'Das Wie des Malens', or 'the how of painting'. It’s a reference to the artist’s search that led to his recent work.

Artists: Ruben Boeren

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