Annet Gelink Gallery proudly announces One ‘O’ hanging between two I’s, the third solo exhibition of Josse Pyl at the gallery.
Pyl uses language as his primary source material. For him, language embraces more than mere communication and can rather be understood as a living presence that shapes our understanding of the world. Using techniques such as frottage, printing, and reliefs, he reflects on the way language shapes our bodies and is shaped by them.
For this exhibition, Pyl transforms the gallery into a spatial poem, revealing traces of a lost language as a ruin. Teeth and tongues, recurring symbols in his work, refer to the body as a gateway through which the unspoken finds its way out, leaving an imprint on the world. Conversely, language leaves its traces on the body, as it moves through our lungs and scrapes along our teeth. The visitor moves through the space in what seems like a tourist or archaeological experience, passing by a series of engraved artifacts. Everywhere, traces of language are visible: signs crumble and split, letters and numbers get lost between different layers of plaster and stone, pictorial and alphabetical scripts are combined, while signs are overwritten and distorted.
Individually, the works consist of letters and words, basic geometric shapes, and comic figures. They can be deciphered like a game of phonetic gymnastics, twisting your tongue while inventing a new type of reading that is close to a form of play. The two arches, mimicking the contours of a jaw imprint, form both a portal and an engraving. Just like the exhibition title, whose meaning shifts when spoken or visualised, Pyl uncovers how language can imitate and imagine the world around us.
With works that seem to hesitate between object and text, between looking and reading, and between language and the world, Pyl creates a world where sight and language overlap, and knowledge through imagination predominates.
On the occasion of Amsterdam Art Week, Josse Pyl will give a frottage workshop for children aged 4 to 14. The workshop will take place at the gallery on Sunday, June 3, at 3:00 PM.
Josse Pyl studied at the Werkplaats Typografie (NL), before completing his residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (NL). Recent solo exhibitions have included Culture Station Seoul, KR (2023), Annet Gelink Gallery (2022), De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, NL (2019), Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL (2019) and 019, Ghent, BE (2018). He was nominated for the Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize 2024.