En Dat Ook

Ever since he moved to The Hague, we have kept an eye on the work of Bram De Jonghe, from his first room-filling installation at Billytown, to his more recent solo presentations at Stroom Den Haag and Art Rotterdam. Though one would expect his large architectural interventions to be the most conspicuous part of his work, they are often of such self-evidence that they’re easily overlooked. It is actually the smaller, subtler works, which are placed within these interventions, that manage to surprise at unexpected moments, from the corner of your eye.

A machine that again and again tries to blow out a candle but never succeeds, a level magically floating in the air above a small shelf, a slightly bending fluorescent tube: they are small works, inspired by everyday subjects, which are preserved in their mysteriousness by the way they’re placed in the whole, as if you just caught them unattended.

The work of Bram De Jonghe arises in the tension between a formalistic and a practical attitude. By installing an obstruction in the exhibition space the viewer will look differently at these surroundings and the imaging grows in the redundant space of the thought. The image is added on the retina to the images that already exist in the mental space and by gathering several works in one specific space a synergy is created that each individual work on its own could not achieve.