There, I Fixed It: René Heyvaert
13 March thru 15 May 2011Location: Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Survey page There, I Fixed It: click here
'There, I Fixed It' refers to a mentality, a way of looking at materials and problems that is both bold and unexpected. Unruly solutions to urgent problems.
René Heyvaert (1929 Gent - 1984 Scheldewindeke) began his career as a successful architect and started working as a visual artist when his body was no longer functioning properly due to illness. In his unstable condition, he developed an extreme relation to architecture and only accepted pure standpoints. He increasingly sought for utopian solutions, and regarded any compromise as betrayal. The only reality worth discussing was the fictional: Heyvaert dreamed of modular systems and spaces with no right angles, rooms that were always changing. These spaces he didn't find in architecture but in the visual arts. He worked with drawings, photographs and mail art, but above all with found objects.
His solemn language drew from constructivist influences in his youth and the minimalism of his time. Form came directly from the basic materials with which he worked and his focus on how objects were used or could be used. On the website of S.M.A.K., that has a large number of his works in their collection, we read: "The cutlery joined together, the perforated handle of a knife, the split spoon and the tineless fork are acute reflections on the usefulness or rather the manageability of the objects. He often poked fun at the perception of everyday user-friendliness."
There are four works of Heyvaert from the seventies in the exhibition: untitled (dreft detergent with cardboard wrapping), untitled (fork tied on wooden board), untitled (split spoon and tineless fork) and untitled (painted black stick). These works come from the Belgian Cera Collection.
The works are minimalist, reminiscent of daily uses and the small changes that make life easier (maybe the bottle of detergent will not slip out of your hands so easily with the cardboard wrapping?) or even harder (a fork without teeth, a split spoon). The simple wooden stick that Heyvaert placed in a museum is a sublime gesture of value creation - the change of context determines whether something is or is not art.
In a short newspaper article in the Gentse Nieuwe Gids from 1973, his work was described as follows: "René Heyvaert brings minimal art, with a great love for form based on simplicity. Small fragments of daily life, and he presents them so that you have to - again - look at them in order to re-see them."
"René Heyvaert was an architect and became an artist. Making art was for him a matter of survival. Art was his only way out and hold, a means to battle his disease. Heyvaert worked with drawings, photographs and mail art, but is especially known for his work with found objects. He takes mundane objects out of their context, brings them into the art world, takes away their function and gives them, with a minimal intervention, a tremendous power and intensity. You feel in the work the tension between two poles, between the objective, intellectual charge and the unique, subjective, emotional charge."
- Michiel Ceulers on the work of René Heyvaert, 2009, www.whatspace.nl
René Heyvaert, untitled, courtesy Cera collection
photo: Rob Kollaard, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
photo: Rob Kollaard, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
René Heyvaert, untitled (Dreft bottle), 1980-1981
photo: courtesy Cera collection
photo: courtesy Cera collection
René Heyvaert, untitled (spoon and fork), 1979
photo: courtesy Cera collection
photo: courtesy Cera collection
René Heyvaert, untitled (fork tied on wooden board), 1979
photo: courtesy Cera collection
photo: courtesy Cera collection
René Heyvaert, untitled (painted black stick), 1972
photo: courtesy Cera collection
photo: courtesy Cera collection