Stefaan Dheedene

After his studies in sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts in Ghent, Stefaan Dheedene (1975) did a post-graduate study at HISK Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp and graduated as a laureate in 2005.

Dheedene’s works are based on social and architectural observations, on accidental encounters or on found images and objects. He deals with them mostly in documentaries, objects and spatial constructions. The resulting works are a combination of abstract poetry and conceptual structure, leaving the viewer confronted with questions about the visual language of things. They are often in-between situations, giving a hint of content without revealing a meaning.

An important part of the works function within the context of globalisation and the subsequent migration of economic and social values and commodities. Dheedene is also particularly interested in situations in which one system (and the inherent language) penetrates into another and creates alienation and confusion on the level of the content, as in his installation BILLY at SMAK.

Dheedene repeatedly deals with observations of a socio-cultural cross-over or shift, or other situations that generate interacting layers of cultural meaning. By reducing the visual and material grammar of the image or object, Dheedene keeps his works in balance between a conventional meaning (or meaninglessness) and a constructed, contextual meaning (or meaninglessness). A balance between a controlled experience and free exploration, a vagueness that results in richness.

Dheedene’s objects play with the present-day conventions about their practical use, social function and spatial context. Some of their features, such as the ‘hand-made’ aspect and the carefully chosen proportions, reveal downright sculptural pretentions, while others betray a conceptual mentality. One feels motivated to read them as sculptures, and it seems perfectly possible to do so. The videoworks are often observations; semi-documentaries in which the content is structered into a format that hesitates between poetry and document. The way information is communicated in the documentary genre(s) is always important for his analysis. His installations are either (re)combinations of objects and constructions in a logical structure or total installations involving the whole physical space as a context, or both.

Generally, Stefaan Dheedene developes an extraordinary suggestive and poetical language using a sophisticated conceptual grammar. His work demonstrates just how emotional, philosophical, and in one word beautiful any kind of ‘conceptual’ language can be.