We live in one big administration, one comprehensive system of unwritten rules that you cannot understand emotionally. This uncanniness is the result of an overdose of empathy and a hypersensitive attentiveness. The necessity of having to deal with this is almost forceful and is at the heart of Anne Van Boxelaere’s collages and paintings.
Her surrounding world is the basis for her paintings. They are constructed in rhythm, colour and texture. “The ultimate abstraction” is how the artist puts it. Subsequently the paintings are partially destroyed and rebuilt, only to be partially destroyed all over again. The construction is moved and terms amended. Part of history transpires like a constructed identity.
Bank and Court each form a series of four pieces. The dry and abstract construction in the paintings suppresses the liquid foundation. Flesh and bone human beings originally created these institutions. The texture of the upper layers of paint is one of make-up and varnish. A mask. An untrustworthy face.
In Agreements social constructions are portrayed. Showing a sports field preserves the notion of a different set up rules applying when encountering a certain line. The colours refer to urban surroundings. They are constructions of agreements. Encounters and concessions. Compromise.
A similar uncanny landscape is set in the piece named Petrol Lines. Urbanism improvises on the same theme and diverges as soon as the desire for clearly defined proportions becomes real.
Anne Van Boxelaere's work emits an air of the classical modernist Bildungs-ideal that uses complex (personal) reality as a premise for construction of image. A technique that is well suited to this purpose is the montage of images. It stems from a necessity for the modern human being to grasp the loss of control and loss of emotional contact with the 'world of things'. This loss is caused by an ever-increasing instrumentalisation and administration.