Patrick Van Caeckenbergh
La gastronomie cosmogonique – Les mains des dieux
(Cosmogonic gastronomy – The hands of the gods, 2021)
Collage and ink on paper, oval frames, wooden furniture, and cut-outs
Overall: 287 x 235 x 51 cm (collage: 231 x 235 x 5 cm; furniture: 89 x 155 x 25 cm; 2 oval frames: 45 x 37 x 2 cm)
Work acquired in 2022
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B. 1960 in Aalst (Belgium), Patrick Van Caeckenbergh lives and works in Saint-Kornelis-Horebeke in Belgium.
He is represented by the following galleries: In situ (France), Zeno X (Belgium), and Lehmann Maupin (United States).
Flemish-Belgian artist Patrick Van Caeckenbergh is passionate about classification methods and is described as an encyclopaedist. In his work, situated between collage, DIY, and accumulation, Dada and Surrealist influences are omnipresent.
Many of his works feature personal elements, as for example, the Winkler Prins encyclopaedia offered to the artist by his mother for his seventh birthday. Drawing a partially autobiographical but also ecologically engagé portrait, through his work, the artist reflects both on his own life and on the place of humans in the world. Indeed, every element in his installations is a symbol or a metaphor, and his work a parable on our contemporary world.
In the Anthropocene era, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh seeks to understand exactly when humankind stopped “taking care” of their vital environment by giving free reign to a rich imagination, borrowing many of its codes from children’s stories.
La gastronomie cosmogonique – Les mains des dieux is a complex installation, composed of a large square collage, an open sewing box filled with cut-out elements, and two medallion portraits. Both the collage and sewing box contain a multitude of images of hands carrying out culinary tasks. This collection of images is a gastronomic metaphor, and glued in concentric circles, the hands draw our gaze towards the centre of the collage, comprised of a black hole or a void. The Anthropocene is an era of no return, and these hundreds of hands seem to remind us of our excessive appetite for the planet, and current problems of overproduction and overexploitation. Conversely, the woman photographed with her hen in the portrait medallions represents an older version of consumerism, and of taking greater “care” of the Earth.
