M HKA Ensembles

Installation, maquette 1: 39,5 x 129 x 86,5 cm; pedestal 1: 126,5 x 129 x 80,5 cm; maquette 2: 90 x 150 x 180 cm; pedestal 2: 101,5 x 150x 180 cm; whole work: 193 x 281,5 x 180 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK7217).

Exercising Nowheres 2 is a model of a swimming pool with a view upon a piece of urban landscape. It is a sort of doll’s house, a mini-theatre on a plinth of simple forged steel, wherein the viewer can let his eyes wander. The rough form of the ‘shell’ leads our gaze inside. The swimming pool is painted in gleaming blue enamel. High windows offer a view onto an urban outskirt with modernist-like apartment buildings. The work exudes a crepuscular sense of estrangement, emptiness and solitude.

Hans Op de Beeck opts for icons of the metropolis: a swimming pool, a train station, a waiting room, a gas station. He does not show these places as contemporary photographers do, peeping at urban reality and showing us – like in a mirror – its beautiful and bizarre aspects. Hans Op de Beeck constructs a fragmentary world via his ‘models’: he interprets reality and tosses this back into the viewer’s lap. The artist describes these models as imposing still-lifes that create an unsettling world.

While viewing this work we discover a number of contradictions, while automatically still attempting to compare it with ‘actual reality’. Striking is the fact that the domain presented here is totally devoid of any actor and all activity. We arrive at a sort of frozen moment, in a ‘blind spot’. The work generates the feeling that something has just happened here, that we’ve arrived on the scene just a bit too late. Exercising Nowheres 2 offers open, narrative suggestions, but the story remains just slightly out-of-image.