Tique | art space presents two artists who use their direct surroundings as source for their artworks: Johan Gustavsson and Thomas Vandenberghe.

While Johan Gustavsson draws situations of familie and friends in fragile pencil strokes, Thomas Vandenberghe uses analogue black & white photography to record his life, especially his intimate encounters with other people.

Johan Gustavsson (Stockholm, 1978) is an artist, curator, and docent based in The Netherlands since 2000. His artistic practice revolves around intuitive thinking and basic human dilemmas. This takes the form of drawings, sculptures, and installations.

At Tique | art space, Johan Gustavsson will show a selection of drawings, of which Hans Theys wrote: “In Gustavsson’s drawings we seem to meet families or small groups of friends that have become petrified icons of a fleeting world. Clocks have stopped ticking, or endlessly gnaw at us with their noisy grinding of unrealised moments of intimacy.

Beautiful, asymmetrical compositions. Beautifully arrested drawings, with hesitating or sturdy, sometimes slowly disappearing lines, with clear shapes that suddenly become indistinct or messed up, with funny color patches, with teapots with juvenile spouts, with depictions of tiny hammers and thin faucets, with sockets connecting us to the outside world, with one-legged tables, miserable Christmas trees and dreamlike summer cottages, with strangely silent protagonists.

What prevails, however, is a feeling to be in the presence of a human being who went through stuff and reports about it, realising that a poetic evocation of failure can be a success.”

The act of remembering is the very core of the work of Thomas Vandenberghe (Gent, 1985). “I have always been attracted to the so-called ‘snapshot’ photography, because it records everyday life, but it is a very personal form of photography. By working at a 1hour photo service I discovered the value of this personal form of diaristic photography. An image is often produced to support the act of remembering. Images become significant; they are a material trace of the past preserved for ‘posterity’. Regardless of the subject matter, the image is often a precious trace of a loved one, a cherished moment…. I started to capture the moments that symbolised my dark periods, quests, pitfalls, all those times I ran away.”

Thomas Vandenberghe also uses the practice of tearing photographs as means to forgetting. By juxtaposition two destroyed images he is creating a new memory.