KRIS FIERENS

http://www.krisfierens.com/

Em que hei de pensar?

Não sou nada.
Nunca serei nada.
Não posso querer ser nada.
À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.
(I am nothing.
I will never be anything.
I cannot want to be anything.
Apart from this, I have within me all the dreams of the world.)1

Like the speaker of Fernando Pessoa’s Tabacaria, the artist Kris Fierens insists on the negative
choice – he always knows what he doesn’t want, whether or not he can clearly articulate what
that means in terms of what he does. Yet above all – and in light of the foregoing this may seem
paradoxical – Fierens never wants to remain vrijblijvend, literally noncommittal, without
obligation. Art, according to Fierens, is obliged to stake claims in order to succeed, to pretend to
something as to a throne for which there may be many contenders. At first glance, it is a
balancing act between vrijheid and vrijblijvendheid, between freedom that chooses and
cowardice that does not. Between the real reality outside, where there are tobacco shops and
trams and street urchins, and the reality within where all things are endlessly possible because
everything is an illusion anyway.

Saio da janela, sento-me numa cadeira. Em que hei de pensar?
(I turn away from the window, sit down in a chair. What should I think about now?)
In that case, what should we think? The way this paradox is articulated in practice is perhaps best
approached through a brief archaeology of Fierens’ oeuvre. Works from the eighties – some of
which are on view in the present show – were more directly engaged with materiality, with the
delicate boundary between painted surface, sculpted form and found object. The combination of
pictorial restraint and found, often coarse materials (a scale, a piece of grooved, deep red foam)
at times earned comparisons with Arte Povera. Which is not entirely accurate, as this diverse
ensemble – however much it withholds itself from fixed categories like ‘painting’ ‘sculpture’ or
‘found object’ – manages to stage itself in a formal, aesthetic context. It manifestly claims to be
sculptural work has evolved from recent works on paper, perhaps via wall painting/the mural –
which has always been an important part of Fierens’ repertoire because it is manifestly spatial.
The new work emerges more literally to take its place. To take a position, which is never
determined in advance. To pretend to something – which is the nothingness of the act.

Visto isto, levanto-me da cadeira. Vou à janela.
(Given that, I get up from the chair. I go to the window.)

To return to the tobacco shop, it is also important to remember that the rejection of
vrijblijvendheid does not entail a collapse into absolute certainty or over-determination. Like the
‘I’ of Pessoa’s Tabacaria, the artist’s position is marked out by a kind of hesitancy born of selfdoubt,
which vacillates endlessly between metaphysical conundrums and the concrete physical
world outside the window. Vacillates is probably the wrong word: it would be more apt to say
that the poet/artist is trying to stitch the two together, and the motion of hesitating between one
and the other by turns ultimately has the force of a thread, however tenuous, drawn between two
unlike fabrics.

To escape the conundrum it is necessary to evert. With a word and a wave, the world is
reconstituted in all its concrete splendor – and metaphysics somehow restored in the act of
choosing.
text by Irene Schaudies, January 2009

1 For the Portuguese and Dutch versions of Fernando Pessoa’s Tabacaria (by the heteronym Álvaro de
Campos), I consulted Fernando Pessoa Gedichten. Keuze, vertaling en nawoord van August Willemsen
(Amsterdam, 1978), 176–87. The English translations are my own.
2 See, for example, Philippe Pirotte’s apt characterization of Fierens’ early work in “The Refusal of Any
Excuse,” in Kris Fierens (Antwerp, 2001), n.p.
3 Idem.
4 On the notion of theatricality as applied to contemporary art, see Michael Fried’s now classic essay “Art
and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, 1998), 148–72.
5 The interested reader might begin with G. Harman, Tool-Being. Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects
(Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 2002).