TRAHIABLAUTA (NICK ERVINCK)
With this sculpture I wanted to symbolize a dance of joy, a sensual movement, the flow of the wind when ballooning, energy and strength. Just in these hard times, I wish a sculpture that radiates optimism and lets young and old dream away in their imagination.
The sculpture looks like a strange endoskeleton, an abstract skeleton given life by the organic, flowing texture. Here I deliberately play with the visual language of Henry Moore's later sculptures. Whereas Michelangelo was still concerned with cutting away, chiselling or carving the material, here the digital design process follows the opposite path, so to speak. The virtually created form was not "liberated" from the material, but results in a productive force in itself. Using 3D technology, I am constantly probing the fragile boundary between what is possible and reality.
The playful sculpture comes fully to life when the sunlight shines on this shiny form and you see the clouds slowly moving over the sculpture. These reflections make the work radiate even more power, poetry and life. The gracefulness and surprise of the sculpture ensures that this work of art will leave no one unmoved. Apart from this content connotation, it is an aesthetic sculpture that makes everyone happy and provides some sunshine even on a rainy day.
My oeuvre is a way of experiencing the world, in its chaotic beauty, in its indeterminable grandeur, in its poetic charm. Against our traditional experience of seeing architecture mainly in BOX form, in horizontals, verticals and in angular spaces, there is another possible view that is rather round, whimsical and unpredictable. All too long Western suspicion of the supposedly formless, for didn't the amorphous escape our irrepressible urge to control and rationalize?
BLOB is indeed rather organic, fully displaying a process of infinite and relentless growth, pushing the minuscule expanding further into the monumentally large. Like a moving splash, an enlarged raindrop, a cosmic egg, a form of energetic pulsation that unbalances and infuses all dimensions with new life.
To choose the potentiality of a world in a permanent BLOB is thus to choose a world with a strong innovative capacity, an impetus for a provocative imagination that allows every possible expansion, nowhere to be foreseen, nowhere to be stopped.
For me, then, BLOB is above all freedom flowing outward, misunderstood freedom admittedly, which is why it is so attractive to an artist. She represents the desire to be sucked into another world, to explore another dimension and thus to step outside traditional reality. In this sense, she floats on an attraction that is at once ancient and contemporary, operating within and beyond this earth, very concrete but also highly symbolic.
My BLOBs fan out, again and again from my passion to transform linear sense (say: ancient architectural order) into more round and fluid forms (say: rhizomatically swarming out chaos). This frames my desire to add something to the grand narrative of sculpture, up to and including wanting to reinvent its most basic forms.
NICK ERVINCK
(°1981)
) graduated in 2003 from the KASK (Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent) with a master's degree in Mixed Media. He then trained in computer modeling, sculpting and working with materials such as polyester, plaster and wood. After teaching at art academies in Tielt, Menen and Kortrijk (2004-2012), he returned to the KASK to spend three years as a visiting professor here. His work consists of large installations, handmade and 3D printed sculptures, ceramics, prints, drawings, light boxes and animated films.
As diverse as this art production may be, above all, he remains fascinated by the "negative space" as he discovered it with classical sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. The finding that a "hole" in matter is such a young idea will probably haunt him for the rest of his life. As a child of his time, he plays a varying game between the physical and virtual world, using both classic and new craftsmanship (computers, 3D printing and milling). From here he explores in his own unique way classical themes such as man (with a focus on his anatomy and the emergence of cyborgs), plants (especially their genetic manipulation), masks and animals, always starting from an (art) historical background that he cuts with contemporary pop and sci-fi culture.
He has received several prizes: Prix Godecharle (2005), The Fortis Young Ones Award (2006), the Provincial Prize for Fine Arts West Flanders (2006) and the Rodenbach Fund Award (2008). In 2013 Ervinck also won the prestigious Merit CODA Award for his art integration IMAGROD
In 2009 Ervinck was praised for WARSUBEC, a monumental project created for the Zebrastraat cultural site in Ghent. Many public and private assignments also followed, including EGNOABER, Emmen; IMAGROD, Ostend; REWAUTAL, Sotogrande; LUCE, Amersfoort; TSENABO, Tielt; and WIBIETOE, Anderlecht. In 2009 he moved to an old car workshop and transformed it into an artist's studio. He founded Studio Nick Ervinck in 2011.
His work has been acquired by art collectors around the world and shown in solo and group exhibitions at NRW-Forum Düsseldorf; Ars Electronics, Linz; MARTa, Herford; Paul Valéry Museum, Sète; Fenaille Museum, Rodez; Laboral, Gijon; Museum Beelden aan Zee, Scheveningen; Bozar, Brussels; Brakke Grond, Amsterdam; S.M.A.K., Ghent; Gallo-Roman Museum, Tongeren; Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; Museum M, Leuven; the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent and the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp.
Outside Europe, Ervinck took his first steps with group exhibitions in UNArt Center, Shanghai; MOCA, Shanghai; Axiom, Tokyo; Oya Stone Mine, Tokyo; Northern Arizona University Art Museum, Flagstaff and Chamber, New York. In 2019, at the request of the City Council of St. Petersburg, Florida, he was commissioned to create a public sculpture in bronze, OLNETOPIA. In 2020, he was asked by the Chinese government to create ALUNIK for the Shenzhen World Conventions & Exhibition Center in Shanghai. In 2021, a large solo museum exhibition is planned for him in Häme Castle organized by the National Museum of Finland. In addition to some 50 works inside and outside, a new monumental installation will also be presented here. A voluminous monograph will also be published in response to this exhibition.
Nick Ervinck lives in Lichtervelde with his wife Kaat and their three children, Lene, Ida and Thor.
