ATOPY gallery

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book - Stéphane Mallarmé 

At the beginning of the pandemic when Trump proclaimed the virus was a hoax, I cut up the book Fear: Trump in the White House as an act of defiance to express my rage at the spineless Trump administration. Initially, the destructive act of cutting the pages became an outlet for my anger, but the obsessive repetition of the process ended up meditative. The destruction of the books comes not as a dismissal of its content but as a transformation from the written to the visual. While they started out as a metaphor of how I felt ‘ripped to sheds’ with loss and anxiety during the Coronavirus crisis, these sculptural decollages, In Praise of Strong Spines express a celebration of the soul. With a strong spine in the face of tragedy, the human spirit can endure.

Amy Bassin is an artist from New York City whose work encompasses altered books, drawing, artist books, sculptural decollage, photography and video to raise awareness against social injustices. Her work has been exhibited and published both nationally and internationally. Her videos represented the United States in the 2020 year-long world tour of Time Is Love, curated by Kisito Assangni. She is a co-founder of the international artists' collective, Urban Dialogues, which participated in a residency and exhibitions, in Lisbon, Portugal and Belgium. 

https://www.amybassin.com

To nowhere
2019, fire & wind on canvas, 50x70cm

"Would there be a village there? Does the moon provide the great contrast? Or is there a fire and I am in the middle of black smoke, just far enough to get a vague picture of what is going on. My gaze is lifted from the white surface, as if it were blown with the wind to the other corners of the image. I discovered a lot of sensitivity and tranquility in this powerful landscape. At the bottom right I seem to discover roofs of houses, or are my eyes misleading me? I keep looking for what I will see behind the clouds, the smoke." - Penelope Deltour in Kunstletters

Frie J. Jacobs is a Belgian visual artist. His oeuvre includes painting, drawings, three-dimensional and digital works, in-situ interventions, visual music scores, handmade artist's books,… For that he uses just about everything that occurs in nature: plants, seeds, flowers, roots, a mushroom, charcoal, beeswax , rain, fire, ... but also acrylic and oil paint, photography, video.

Jacobs also composes soundscapes for videos as first prize winner of the Slovak Press Photo Strangers in Motion and Day 43, which received a 2nd place at the Czech Film Festival “Czech Vision” in Category Experimental Film, both collaborations with the Czech photographer and video maker Jana Hunterova, and is a member of the international artist collective, Urban Dialogues, with whom he made the exhibition Encontro de Rios in Lisbon in 2018.

A book about his work, entitled A lesser life, was published in 2017 with an introduction by New York writer Mark Blickley.

https://www.frie-j-jacobs.be

Color is merely an illusion - Gabriel Orozco

"The subtle and fragile equilibrium between revealing and concealing, between how the various techniques and materials embrace each other, is a way of thinking. Language in the form of titles refers to the philosophical and poetical layeredness of this artistic oeuvre. Color, too, has turned into an idea in Truyffaut’s oeuvre. Color doesn’t exist as a single layer, but in different layers, with the artist unemphatically pointing out that there’s always much more to be seen than what is shown at first glance. And that one image generates multiple readings, multiple ways of looking, of perceiving, of interpreting." - Inge Braeckman (translation: Dirk Verbiest)

© Photos: Sara Labidi, except Mutation des alentours: Sander De Wilde
reference Gallery CAPS 

With a focus on the feeling and experience of color, Camille Truyffaut uses different media to create subtle textures by playing with layered surfaces. She catches the ephemeral quality of light and the power of poetry to keep her works in a dynamic transformation.

The viewer’s perception gets triggered by the image which becomes almost immaterial, existing in between physical and mental space.

https://www.camilletruyffaut.com