Annet Gelink Gallery is proud to present CA NTS EE MY TO NGU E, Josse Pyl's second exhibition in The Bakery.
Josse Pyl explores the production of language and how it substantiates and influences our experience and knowledge of the world around us. How words and texts pass through bodies, how language and speech are formed and disintegrate. Pyl tries to understand this intertwined system without hierarchy and through the making of drawings, sculptures, videos and environments where language and stories are formed, where they move and are lost. A grammar of works attentively articulates our relationship with language and how it functions as a cultural artifact that contains (un)pronounced—therefore, sometimes involuted and intuitive—ideas.
Pyl's drawings and objects can be considered as characters or symbols that re-create a separated linguistic world; one that exists and is permeated with its own internal logic, in which the forms of communication are made tangible and plausible yet alienated. Signs are turned into material characters and objects transform into symbols. This results in a spacial lexicon that appears to hesitate between image and text.
For his latest exhibition, Pyl created an installation consisting of broken walls that are engraved with signs and symbols, forming a sentence of reliefs. The reliefs reflect Pyl's fascination for documenting and arranging reality. Like his drawings that are made using the technique of frottage, the engravings in this installation appear from the objects they represent. On the one hand, they document the images on the stone surface, yet they also become objects themselves. Just like signs and symbols, the molded images do not depict but represent something. The message of these images is at once transcribed and distorted, a familiar technique within Pyl's practice. By converting a shape into its negative, Pyl frames and makes tangible memories in the way in which spoken language engraves and leaves its traces on teeth.
Josse Pyl (1991, St-Niklaas, Belgium) studied at Werkplaats Typografie (NL), before completing his residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (NL). Recent solo exhibitions include shows at the Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, NL (2019), Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL (2019) and 019, Ghent, BE (2018).