Bas Geerts

About

Dutch, b. 1971   —   The question at the core of Bas Geerts’ practice is the timeless discourse on mimesis: how to represent reality. What interests him the most is however not the actual material world, but the digital one (even if one could ask whether such a distinction can be truly made, nowadays). His works serve as a possible way of translating the digital realm, ubiquitous and contemporary filter of our life, onto a concrete and tangible surface. To do so, Geerts employs precisely what today’s technology has to offer: digital instruments. During the years, he developed a computer program able to transform technological algorithms into organic designs, shapes and forms of unpredictable format. To materialize them into the physical, Geerts proceeds to transpose the resulting patterns upon the surface of canvases, using metal leaf (24k gold, aluminium and brass) and by applying contemporary synthetic pigments and acrylics. Like a craftsman, he succeeds in the process of transposition from one realm into the other. The interesting aspect of this process is that he takes on two roles, that of the creator and designer of a system and then that of the implementer, who follows what the system creates. This is peculiar because by doing so he bypasses one role: that of the actual maker. He is now the origin and the result, without being the direct author. The beautiful and abstract works that emerge from this complex procedure are the materialization of the ephemeral, the formal answer to a new way of making art, painting with the possibilities that today has to offer. (text by Sara van Bussel)