SOFACQ Gallery

Vision (By Frans Gentils)

 

When I was seven years old, in around  1957, building works were being carried out for the new Port of  Antwerp. The works produced sand that covered villages, and in a sense part of our civilisation, and I would go out looking for fossils buried underneath it. My passion for archaeology, evolution and entropy was formed at that time, and these fields would go on to shape my world-view.  Later, I explored these subjects in more depth, spending many hours at places connected to them, such as industrial sites, natural history museums, shipyards and rubbish tips.I realised then that there was an underlying connection between the fossil patterns, chaotic landslides, waste and human thinking shaped by evolution. This is what I call ” evolutionary design “.                                                                                                                          

Because a large part of our brain evolved early on, our most deeply embedded (and often most basic) characteristics can be demonstrated and linked to our vision of humanity through art, which is inevitably subjective.

 

The laws of nature that determined evolution have a mathematical language that makes the patterns we form in our heads metaphorical. These patterns can be interpreted, combined and represented in differend ways.  All of this is at the origin of my work as it tries to capture the beauty and mysticism of our times."