No Man’s Art Gallery is honoured to present A scallop has two hundred eyes; twelve paintings on what they might see, the first solo exhibition by Dutch painter Tobias Thaens at the gallery. Thaens affirms the ongoing interconnectedness between nature and the artistic, building androgynous worlds in which organic matter is interwoven with threads of creative sensitivity and vulnerability. Opening on Saturday, 14th September from 5pm to 8pm. Gallery Season Afterparty from 8pm – late. The exhibition runs until 20th October 2024.
Just as butterflies drink the tears of crocodiles, turtles, and birds, the spectator is invited to an intimate meeting between two entirely different entities – nature and culture, biology and poetry – all trying to make sense of the reality surrounding them. In a macrocosm and on canvas, Thaens brings a touch of romance to the dull vastness of the everyday through his painting practice.
Inspired by the Canadian poet Anne Carson, Thaens aligns himself with the author in an attempt to “entertain a question, without conclusion but not without interest,” to break free from the codes that instrumentalise how we describe and perceive the world. While Carson’s practice lies in the realm of language, for Thaens, it is in imagery. Holding onto this expansive approach, where connections previously unseen can be made, is the thread that draws Thaens to Carson’s writings, allowing him to surface a certain multifaceted intimacy, transferring the in-between space from page to canvas, from word to brushstroke, from memory to landscape.
In this way, Thaens finishes his paintings without ever truly completing them; he constructs them amidst juxtapositions and parallels, worlds and entities, and leaves them to breathe, to continue their cycle of existence in the moment, while still alluding to a multiplicity of meanings and beings. This fluid, epicene, and hermaphroditic world of the in-between, in which Thaens situates his practice, is simultaneously an invitation to an internal dialogue between the artist and the subject being painted; often enveloping non-human creatures, fostering conversations between dissimilar beings, and filtering reality through a riddle of our physical limitations.
(Text by Zuzia Szatkowska)
A scallop has two hundred eyes; twelve paintings on what they might see spans both gallery locations: Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327 and Bos en Lommerweg 88.
