O
1998
Photography, 59 x 89 cm.
Materials: photo, paper
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK7182).
The drawing O is part of the series Auto-Mio by Gert Verhoeven. Auto-Mio is a series of 14 color photographs on paper. Verhoeven reworks photographs of seedlings and plants with drawings and texts. The titles are written in a kind of Italian-like gibberish, with all words ending in ‘o’. The meaning appears clear. ‘O’ refers to null, to zero – a starting point. Verhoeven begins from zero without attaching importance to precedent or past. Freely translated, Auto-Mio can mean ‘Self-I’, the text thus referring here to the artist himself. The photographic series is based on amalgamating botanical elements into all manner of strange and erotic scenes. At the same time, they are appointed with playful and enigmatic words in felt-tip. Playing with words is a typical characteristic of Verhoeven’s work. He makes unexpected associations between words and things or between words and each other (for example, by using compound words).
At the forefront of each photo sheet a small ‘event’ – like a head of salad or a pot with white beans – is shown against a rose-pink or violet color-field. From here often emerges a line of drawn beans or seedlings: the drawings reproduce themselves in ever-continuing series that one may compare with the series Copy-Boules. The photographic series can also be seen as an escape route, where nothing is fixed and everything can evolve independently. Annotations rapidly written on the drawings lead or support the process, Auto in Extremio, Imaginatio tinto, Imaginatio una, duo, tres, …
