The NK Gallery in Antwerp now exhibits GNI-RI with forms ripe with profundity by Belgium artist Nick Ervinck. Produced using 3D printing, the forms take shape as an art that reveals as much about the viewer as it does the prowess of the technology allowing its creation. The show consists of a series of Lightboxes, prints, polyester sculptures and 3D prints. The works themselves aggressively defy concise description and continue to embellish the beautiful and curious work Ervinck continues to display.
The forms branch out from earlier work in canary yellow and melt the organic with non-organic as a bridge between art and social critique. Pieces include influence from Chinese rock formations, baroque and rococo motifs, manga imagery and details of medical manuals. All digitally reproduced, mirrored, distorted and rebuilt again by Ervinck. The distortion acts as a kind of Rorschach test begging the viewer to provide an interpretation drawn from personal concerns and experience. GNI-RI folds and blooms in veins and hybrids with polymer sheen and exoskeleton alienation, yet oddly familiar in an intimate and unsettling fascination.
For instance, the vase figure titled NABEKIESAV, as seen in the image above, evokes the feminine and masculine as life forms. The branched antlers extend at the lower base like ovaries holding yellow dimpled eggs descending to a bulged fecund blue vase rippled like exposed muscle fibers. Leaves grow out of the bleached skeleton branches and the egg forms are dimpled, as stated earlier, much like blastulas (the hollow sphere of cells formed during an early stage of embryonic development in animals). While such an interpretation might appear a strain, it is the result of what the artwork does by simply existing.
Ervinck successfully achieves what 3D printing intends — especially with art, and that is to cross genres between the real and virtual. To quote Hans Theys: “Henry Moore would never have been able to make it because the form is much too complicated. Ervinck can make this form because he can design it in 3D programs. Here we see a fine example of how the simultaneous progress he makes with 3D drawings and traditional sculpting leads to new forms”. These new forms represent the frontier crossing, the boundary pushing and breaking now possible in the twisted visions of artists like Ervinck.
Source: NK Gallery
