Elias Ghekiere

Fountain (Work for Daan)
83 × 124 cm, oil on canvas, 2015
Reclining Nude
60 × 70 cm, oil on canvas, 2015
Full Phantom Five
50 × 70 cm, oil on canvas, 2014
Elias Ghekiere (b.1991) utilises photography, drawings, and more recently sculptures as source materials for his paintings. He is fascinated with the communicative value of art historical derivatives. Particularly interested in the painterly remains of modern and contemporary imagery, he started an on-going series of paintings based on hobbyist sources. These photographic settings show products or decorative items, usually presented in a domestic space. The objects and spaces present strong analogies with the genre of the still life, yet are not classifiable as citations or references. In this series, he examines the latent influence of painting on commercial photography – leading to a reduction to purely formal elements, which in turn invites us to reinterpret the moralizing visual language.

His recent series Silvershit is based on bronze and silver artefacts from the 17th century to modernism. They are made with particular technical attention to light and texture in a manner reminiscent of the trompe l'oeil and grisaille technique. The question arises: what is the subject? And what are the implications of the plausible answers?

The project in collaboration with FLACC is a continuation of this visual dialogue. By developing three-dimensional objects – which initially serve a pictorial translation – he orchestrates the creative process, and utilises his dilettantism as a determining factor. We can conclude that painting plays a central role in his thinking about images – both the possibilities of the medium as well as the cult of painting become a subject in Ghekiere’s art.