Trapped Reality

Santa Monica art center / Barcelona, 1997

Mark1

5 videos on monitors, B&W, 20''

Richard Venlet was invited to take part in Trapped Reality, not as a participating artist, but to help design the spatial plan for this group exhibition. He projected on the floor a grid of wide white stripes to which the artists had to adhere, and on which "free walls" were placed wherever the artists wished to ensure the protection, autonomy and/or privacy required by their work. However, Richard Venlet was clearly not invited as an architect, but his exhibition plan is based on the concept of an artistic praxis designing a neutral frame in the problematic architectural context of Santa Monica.

Luk Lambrecht (in Trapped Reality catalogue )

Alec De Busschère takes Venlet's proposal to the letter and presents a series of monitors displaying animated computer-generated images showing the virtual space created for the exhibition. Each animation represents a different point of view of the space, corresponding to the place in which the video was placed. A diagram, similar to those used in the public space with the mention "You Are Here", is presented as an object. De Busschère is concerned with the approach/friction between reality and fiction, clearly indicated in the computer-generated image, which does not exist in reality. He is also concerned with ambiguity, these two notions of reality and fiction, and also the notion of art and the artistic object, the artist, the architect or the observed observer; he works on the limits of the status of things.

Teresa Grandas (in Trapped Reality catalogue )
 

Mark2