For all the lost souls
Ian Humphreys / Didier Leemans
Private view: 13.04.2023
Exhibition: 14.04. - 27.05.2023
The story goes...my dear friend the priest has always called me, since we first met, 'the pagan heathen from across the water, but he really means it as a term of endearment. A year ago when I met him in the local supermarket, he said 'Hello Ian, how are you, are you still a pagan heathen?', 'I am', I said and with that, he shook my hand but when we released my hands, in my hand was a little set of rosary beads. He smiled and looked me in the eye and said 'that's from one pagan to another'. I laughed and said 'thank you father'. After this meeting, I thought about what I should do with these beads and it became clear to me that I should put them into my painting, 'For all the Lost Souls'.
- Ian Humphreys
Drawing in ‘tree’ dimensions or making a voluminous drawing
For a number of years my exploration has focussed on the « Human Presence », a sort of evocation of the body and its spatial relationship imprinted in the memory. The study of anatomy has allowed me to analyse, decompose and construct a whole repertory of signs, a sort of synopsis of the body where the bodily archetype and its universality become detached from the representation of an identity.
The mutable materiality of wood permits various possibilities of drawing marks with the chainsaw, the trace of the tool remaining as a vibration in the material, like a scarification of the body.
By emphasising the belly, ribs and sternum enclosing the lungs, the torso then becomes a sort of breath. By opening the interior space of the tree, the trunk takes the shape of a body.
Subsequently I aggregate different stages of a movement suggesting the before and after in a back and forth between the inner anatomical structure and the rough or smooth outer texture. A volumetric snapshot, a creation of tension, a suspension, as if, all of a sudden, everything is about to move.
- Didier Leemans
