Made in close collaboration with Maartje Claes and Lennert Lefever

A principle is a supposed fundamental truth, rule or belief — something that could possibly prompt a
chain of reasoning, or govern one’s behaviour. In Principles Lennert Lefever and Jacob Lambrecht, in
dialogue with Maartje Claes, comb through personal props and vanishing points, staging a dialogue
between a painter and a mouse. The painter’s principles imitate the language of commandments,
axioms or scientific laws, revealing how flimsy, theatrical and imaginative our systems of truth can be.
The mouse sets the camera, turns around and exits the scene. The situation that grows between the two of them contains proposals for how a world might be understood. A sliver of pop meets moving images. See: you hear a familiar melody, slightly mystical, then that boomerang-like return, an antimonument, a hazelnut? For both the painter and the mouse, attention requires a stepping back from the self. Jacob Lambrecht, Lennert Lefever and Maartje Claes want to engage with the world as they find it; taking all the material mess of the present seriously.

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The mouse that became a pixel

In The mouse that became a pixel, a person slowly walks away from the camera across a narrow island in Greece. As he recedes, his body gradually dissolves into the smallest discernible unit of the image; a single pixel. One human figure becomes one digital particle. The landscape sets the limit. At roughly one kilometre, the body slips beyond recognition. The camera is installed, the stage is set, and then the main character turns away, walking out of view. The “mouse” becomes a proxy, a stand-in that redirects attention away from identity and toward perception itself. At close range, we see a person; at a distance, a flicker; ultimately, a single pixel, equal to any other. In this reduction lies a strange form of clarity.

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Principles

Series of 9 paintings, 2 × 1.5 m
Principles is a series that begins with a quick 5-minute drawing made with a computer mouse inside a 200 × 200-pixel frame. What appears at first as a crude digital sketch, a field of 40,000 tiny binary blocks, becomes a painting through months of slow labour. Each pixel is painstakingly translated by hand into a 2-metre-high surface, making the smallest digital unit into something physical and unmistakably human.

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In the end there is a dancing scene

Three LED pixel-screens, one on each floor, tracing a vertical axis through the building. The ground floor shows a pixel moving from one side of the screen to the other. On the first floor we see the same screen, the same movement pattern but the figure is bigger and this time a human figure is vaguely discernible. On the second floor we see the same figure once more (pictures). this time we see clearly he is dancing, jumping and running around with enthousiasm and vulnerability. This three-part work initially shows us a single flickering pixel, to eventually reveal that that single pixel contained all the movement and emotion of a whole life.

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Round-and-around-ism (sound)

The sound installation Round-and-around-ism operates as a subtle yet insistent companion to the
visual works. As the artists’ slight nod toward the visitor, it intends to guide and sharpen the direction
of the gaze. As they state theirselves: “A razor-sharp penetration of the outer ear with a narrow streak
of popular culture. It is important that the chosen sound piece belongs to popular music, so that it
immediately triggers recognition in the viewer.” The abstraction of the sound fragment, moving haltingly and staccato through the space in short bursts of energy, creates a renewed interpretation of the pop song and the images present.

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‘The Daoist story of a yak as big as heaven comes from the Zhuangzi
(Chapter 1, “Free and Easy Wandering”)’

The image -an epic scene of Jacob and Lennert holding hands, staring at a sky filled by an immense yak- was subtly presented between some plants. A testament to friendship, disbelief, the fauna of France and the vision of ancient Daoist writers.

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