Patrick van Caechenbergh at White Cube - London, England - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, April, 1996 by Melissa Feldman

For his first solo show outside continental Europe, Belgian artist Patrick van Caeckenbergh presented "The Very Life, Part III," the latest in a series of wacky, visionary installations. While Parts I and II offered domestic displays of altered furniture (for instance, a cabinet whose drawers were papered inside and out with pictures of flesh), Part III took the form of a burlesque science-fair display of diagrammatic collages and models. Van Caeckenbergh's work, which humorously laces theoretical systems with organic incident, is related to that of his compatriot Marcel Broodthaers.

Aided by a press release in the form of a hand-scripted letter from the artist to gallery owner Jay Jopling, the works on view expounded on van Caeckenbergh's scatological conception of the universe. The Bum, a surrealistic, 6 1/2-by-6-foot collage fashioned after an antique astronomical map, encapsulates his theory. Floating in the center is a giant cutout black-and-white photograph of a human buttock shown in three-quarter view; it is the Earth. This planetary "body" consumes from an open mouth painted at its top and then flatulates the painted clouds which encircle it. The effect is of a farcical Baroque ceiling tondo. The bum-planet is surrounded with curious cutouts of stomachs with pictures of clog-shod feet and teacup handles attached. (The recurrent clog motif in this show lent it a local Flemish flavor.) According to the artist's letter, these are gastric "angels" who save the Earth from its "cruel balance" of overproduction and overconsumption. In the darker surrounding area are small cutout pictures of hands preparing food on which the planet feeds.

Other works, including a wall-mounted diorama, reiterate aspects of this cosmological system or elaborate on its genesis. Using simplified forms outlined in black and resembling a medieval woodcut, the large painted collage "and see that you never pass it on" illustrates the birth of an angel. The central figure, sprouting from carrotlike legs whose myriad roots support a mobile of collaged clogs, has a head composed of flowers and fruits. The work's antique associations are offset by dental photographs of the blistered insides of diseased mouths set within each red fruit (in fact, making it red) and the image of an intestinal tract pasted on the tree-trunk torso.

Another work, Ali-Baba, is a charmingly clumsy clay sculpture of a camel sporting a teapot-lid hump and a swanlike elephant's trunk instead of a head. Festooned with bell-spangled gold chains and set atop a pedestal decorated in a circus motif, this chimera stands almost 6 feet tall in earth-filled clogs. In a visual reiteration of the theme of the show, the camel's form resembles a human stomach. Throughout "The Very Life," digestion provided an apt model for van Caeckenbergh's own art, which feasts on found, altered and recycled images.