Cerith Wyn Evans
In girium imus ..., 2006
Neon
15th October 2009 - 10th January 2010
The Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans has, at the request of deSingel, taken his inspiration from the architecture of the site, both present and absent. Wyn Evans work is striking above all for its refined and coded relations with space, light and language. This is hinted at in the cryptic title of his exhibition: ". . .", or 'so to speak'. In his custom-made work, Wyn Evans uses unexpected means – luminous columns, philosophical writings, projection, reflections and fireworks – to create a polymorphous, intertextual and poetic space in which darkness emerges from light. In his exhibition at deSingel, Wyn Evans is now emphatically adding his thoughts on architecture to his oeuvre of 'aesthetic clashes', which arise somewhere between surrealism, pre-pop art and situationist utopias. One of the works in which this is made apparent is the new firework piece 'In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni'. The title is a reference to a palindrome in medieval Latin which, loosely translated, means 'We go round and round in the night and we are consumed by fire'. There is a new neon work newly conceived for this exhibition – a quote from a film review on the French situationist Guy Debord – 'Permit yourself to drift from what you are reading at this very moment into another situation ... Imagine a situation that, in all likelihood, you've never been in'. Wyn Evans' artistic career started in the seventies as an assistant to the film director Derek Jarman. Later, in the early eighties, he worked with the 'punk choreographer' Michael Clark and such indie bands as The Smiths and The Fall. Cerith Wyn Evans has taken part in the Biennales in Venice (1995, 2003, 2009) and Istanbul (2005), Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002) and the Tate Triennial in London (2006). He recently had one-man shows at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston (USA, 2004), the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (F, 2006), CCA Kitakyushu (J, 2007) and Musac in Léon (E, 2008).
In his new artist's book, released for the exhibition, Wyn Evans refers to two ground-breaking publications of the last century: "Un coup de dés jamais ln'abolira le hasard – poême" from 1914 by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and its 1969 'translation' by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. Wyn Evans' lavishly designed tribute contains just a single sentence, the one he used for the neon work made on commission to deSingel. Each letter was cut out of paper with a laser and the words were distributed irregularly over the whole volume.
Cerith Wyn Evans, ". . ." - delay
32 pages, 24.7 x 32.5 cm, 500 copies, numbered 1 to 500
Available from deSingel
