UMA LULIK__ is pleased to invite you to the opening of the first exhibition in Portugal by Stan Van Steendam which will take place in the gallery space, on May 12 from 4pm to 9pm
"Arid is an exhibition by Stan Van Steendam that features three works that occupy the gallery walls and establish a dialogue around a place of transition. Overlapping density and rarefaction, vibration and containment, the open and the hidden, Van Steendam inquires about the constitution of painting in an operation that takes place between the body of an object and its pictorial surface.
Exploring a logic of deposition in which the materials’ nature, context, and work produce their inherent images and shapes, the pieces are made horizontally, on a worktable, close to the artist’s body. On a wooden base that stands as a starting point, Van Steendam applies pigment, plaster and dust collected from his studio’s surroundings. In...this process, time and gravity create a logic of strata, which expresses both chance and choice, that marks a path that is made between composition and happening". (...)
In Arid, exhibition text by Sérgio Fazenda Rodrigues, 2022
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(...) "Stan Van Steendam’s enigmatic, iconic and visceral work challenges all our ideas, all the established notions of both tradition and modernity. The results are delicate sculptural virtuosity and gentle monochromatic investigations. His work, of an intuitive nature, aims to deconstruct the materiality of painting that he explores through an extensive process of layering raw pigments, plaster and epoxy resin on wood in addition to other materials such as ash, dirt and dust. It creates a new idea of the pictorial tradition, which definitely enables new perceptual experiences.
Van Steendam currently lives between Brussels and Lisbon. Lisbon has particularly influenced his work over the last two years, especially because of the dystopian and desert-like atmosphere of the industrial area where he lives, called Barreiro". (...)
Domenico di Chirico
