Joke Derycke
“The works of Joke Derycke (1991, BE) can be called painting collages. They are bursting with elements and symbols, which ensures that the viewer's eye is never returned to one and the same place. Like the rest of her oeuvre, Flemish landscape is a work to contemplate slowly and thoughtfully. Her paintings clearly show the influence of social digitalisation. The fragmentary, collage-like whole with a good pinch of surrealism is also full of references to art and cultural history. This is how it works, they are anamorfo - six: the transformation of certain objects on a two-dimensional surface that they are just from a certain point of view, or perspective. A’ trick ' that we also find in the ambassadors of Hans Holbein the younger. We can also say the same about the issues she raises.
This return to the ‘ability’ of art is also visible in the work of Joke DeryckeDerycke distinguishes herself from her colleagues who walk this genrepad by her tech: she shows considerably more attention to perception, not only in terms of form, but also in terms of painting performance, which reinforces the work.
Joke Derycke has a penchant for large formats. Large canvases offer more scope, allow landslides ; or at least shifts of visual fragments. Some fragments get a very realistic interpretation, others a brutal brush-swinging execution. This contrast between "linear-plastic" and "pictorial" is historically worn (classical versus Romantic), which in Joke Derycke leads to the free picking of useful components. The direction takes shape through collage and computer technology.
Joke Derycke shows us this distrust by conveying the usual contradictions together in one image. In her recycling of art-historical images, she mixes the works that have been found good over time with those that are referred to as kitsch. She is also surprised that worthless paintings have ended up in a museum. By quoting them in her work, she criticises the museum system. Well-crafted works like this by Louis David, she confronts her with rather sloppy painting, without passing judgment. Recognized beauty and the ugly turn them upside down. She contrasts the works painted with ratio with the expressive in art. The heavenly descends and the earthly rises. Exuberances are put at odds with the sober simplicity. The images obtained are fairytale with corresponding alienation. That the two classic genres, landscape and still life, are unwillingly combined, can only increase the feeling of stirred discontent.
In the actual collage, not just the way of deconstructive thinking, she puts carefully selected elements in a mysterious container with glass in front of it, a thing to cherish. Also starting point to paint. The collages can also be assembled using the computer, the window that gives a view of the world realm faster than with “Open Sesame”. Collages composed in this way are also painted on canvas. Playing with the collage is indeed the core of Joke Derycke's works. Let us not forget the prophetic words of Max Ernst from 1937 when the Surrealists were looking for a less technical term for ‘collage’ because it was not found spiritual enough: “Ce n'est pas la colle qui fait le collage”.
Willem Elias
