In ‘It was like so, but wasn’t’, Michaël Aerts' fourth solo exhibition at Deweer Gallery, Michaël Aerts (° 1979, Ghent) brings together new sculptures and drawings that as a whole reflect a similar underlying concept.

First, there are new busts. In a visual sense they are perfectly in line with Aerts' pervasive interest in historical types of sculpture, yet here they exude an even stronger conceptual dimension. The busts are an objectification of human thought. The wrapped busts do not give prominence to the portrait of a particular individual human being, but rather the portrait of a person who distinguished him or herself through thoughts that were objectified into externalised acts; acts through which he or she consequently managed to change the world. It is a portrait of humanity, of the fact that we, in our culture, depict human thinking by means of an object. The busts are anonymous. Foregrounded here is the principle of thought translated into objects. Here, these busts become as it were objects that represent a form of thought. In this way, they also act as metaphors of art itself, of our way of engaging with art.

The fact that the busts are wrapped points to the circumstance of a world in motion. The act of wrapping or packing comes to represent an intermediary moment, one that exists between packing and unpacking, between one place and another, between one moment and the next. The time in-between also points to the recent past; the object is – in effect – packaged, ready for anything that is about to follow. The busts, as sculptures – coloured with fine pigments, simultaneously acquire an essential pictorial dimension.

Stubbed-out cigarettes are the mobile monuments of our time par excellence. In every city, every day, we find stubbed-out, discarded cigarette butts that litter the collective space. After consumption, the cigarettes become litter. Every single cigarette was at one time smoked by someone in a very personal way, in specific circumstances, and was stubbed out in a visibly discernable manner. As anonymous as the cigarette butts we see around us may appear, they were, at one point, ever so intimately connected with their smoker. The cigarette butts in the sculpture ‘G-Litter’ glisten, they have become ‘glitter’. These cigarette butts were precisely moulded and cast in a very pure silver alloy, commonly known as Sterling Silver, and stamped with the official silver hallmark. The execution in silver infuses the very object that has lost all value – the stubbed-out cigarette butt –, with a fair value and it is precisely this object that is then strewn across the gallery floor. In this way, both the work and the artist go against the trend that is peculiar to our time. After all, today, most values have become separated from their initial equivalent or standard. Coins are no longer covered by gold reserves; the economic value of goods is disconnected from any other value. Similarly, the value of art is no longer based on an actual fair value. Not so, however, in ‘G-Litter’.

Silver has indeed played an important role in our industrial and artistic past and still plays this role today; suffice it to think, for instance, of the silver used in our mobile phones and computers.

As mentioned, the exhibition also includes new drawings, namely the series ‘Black Box’ and ‘Palazzo di Bondoni’. ‘Black Box’ consists of burnt drawings, much in line with Michaël Aerts’ previous work phases. Here, however, the drawings have become monochrome black. Michaël Aerts made ​​his first burned drawings in response to the Arab Spring of 2011. Motifs with cultural historical references to ideas of renewal have been burned in black paper mounted on a black background, set in a black picture frame. The remains of burning and traces of fire, the element of renewal par excellence, evidence the transition which the works, and their motifs, have undergone – from one state to another. Much like the wrapped, monochrome black busts, they present us with a snapshot of an on-going transition. If the pigment coating gives the busts a rather pictorial appearance, then the Black Box drawings, in contrast, acquire a sculptural dimension that derives from the manner in which they are constructed and presented. The drawings in ‘Palazzo di Bondoni’, which were made by means of a digital method, are also monochrome black. These works are based on architectural elements taken from the frescoes of Giotto di Bondoni. Through repeated digital processes, scans of photos of selected motifs soaked in water are processed into a final, monochrome black image.

Whether drawing or sculpture, every work in ‘It was like so, but wasn’t’ evinces in a highly condensed, poetic manner an innovative artist’s view on various aspects of our contemporary world and society.