Yves Velter – translation Martin Desloovere

Yves Velter lives and works in Ostend, Belgium. An awareness of displacement and alienation constitutes the basis for his work, in which an interest in human (and humane) values comes to the fore.

The muted characters in his work are based on existing people who have been made unrecognizable by making them abstract to a certain extent. They are placed in situations in which they create an opening in reality, thus enabling them to break through the impossibility of showing emotions.

The images show the contrast between representation and abstraction. It is an aspect that works on several levels: the elusiveness of emotions, sensuality, fears, desires, individuality…

In contrast to science, art is a domain where unconventional reasoning remains a possibility. The artist immerses himself in the world of a woman who is caught up in a closed-off logic of writing letters in a code all of her own. He considers these intimate scripts to provide a parallel with the world of the arts, where an artist also creates codes in order to translate his own world of thoughts. In the eyes, “the mirrors of the soul”, of his figures we can see small pieces of the aforementioned letters.

Other objects and materials from several origins that carry a comparable tension within them (red dots, soil from his parents’ garden, cardboard, clothing…) are also being used as ingredients in his works. 

In a world of his own he investigates and reorders the experiences, objects and metaphors which possess this ‘tension’. With connection to this, the artists speaks of making ‘corrections of ratio’ which enable him to use his very own code of images in order to give expression to the unanswerable.

Presence, an indoor study. – translation Martin Desloovere

This work is giving the suggestion of shape to a “de-bodied” body. On the outside, shape can be recognized, while on the inside we can see volume, yet it still is a sculpture without skin.

It is possible to look and feel right through it. It is an image of somebody we cannot get to.
This ethereal quality of this image is reinforced by the illusion that the sculpture is floating within the space where it has been placed.

In order to visualize subjects that have no visual qualities, I investigate the possibilities of finding an alternative that has an equal value.
One such possibility consists in redefining, reshaping the subject into a visual metaphor.

Since 1995 I have been concentrating in my work on creating a visual language consisting of different materials, objects and symbolic representations that are all part of a visual code.

Earth from my parents’ garden, cardboard, clothing, coded letters, 80-year-old colour pigments, etc...: all of these elements carry a story and have the quality of becoming metaphors.
In 1996 a new element was introduced as a metaphor for fear and longing: these feelings are represented by clusters of little red dots. The nature of this representation however makes it difficult to create a three-dimensional appearance; a hologram could provide a technical solution, but this technology is too specialised and too expensive, and above all the poetic aspect would lose much of its potential.

In 2004 I undertook some research into the possibilities of creating volume with thin wire and metal balls. I found that, when lots of wires are placed close to one another in a grate-like structure and then get little metal balls attached to them, it became possible to create clusters “floating” in space. Shortly afterwards I succeeded in designing a human figure (the most archaic figure) with this technique. A few months later I acquired the necessary technical knowledge and skill to keep the 2,5m high sculpture stable. The first study was ready.

Since May 2006 this experimental sculpture is permanently on display in ‘Provinciehuis Boeverbos’, Bruges (Belgium).

Annelies Vantyghem – translation Martin Desloovere

The works of Yves Velter are strung together by a thematic thread. Existential questions and the psychological issues involved constitute the central content of his artistic production.

Velter considers it a challenge to render visible those aspects of reality that are not visual but seep through into reality nonetheless. With “Presence” he has in his own way given shape to immaterial and invisible psychological components of man.

His floating sculpture “Presence” (2006) suggests a human shape. Strangely enough it looks more like a shadow than a human being of flesh and blood. The sculpture allows us to look right through it, yet it is present. It has no skin (shield) and lacks a spine (sturdiness).

The figure defies us in all its psychological nudity. It has been skinned and grants us a look underneath. The little red balls that constitute the sculpture are used by Velter as a metaphor for two elementary human feelings: fear and desire. By way of protecting ourselves, we have a tendency to hide precisely these feelings from others, or sometimes even more: to deny them to ourselves. They are under a taboo and being open about them makes us vulnerable.

The characters in black, stylized outfits who inhabit Velter’s paintings, strongly contrast with the white vacuum that surrounds them. Their mouths are missing and their eyes have been reduced to blind spots: empty eye cavities or spectacles with pieces of text glued to the glasses. Their incapacity to talk and to see makes them socially handicapped.

After all, communication at its most basic level consists of sending and receiving, and it’s precisely these skills that have been physically taken from them. Trapped in their autistic state they only succeed in presenting us with an unintelligible amoeba of emotions or in letting fears and desires bleed out through a cut in their arm.

The themes that Velter reflects upon are closely linked to a fact from his family context. The fragments of text that appear in his artwork are taken from letters written by an autistic aunt. The breakdown in communication she experienced pushed her into creating a world of her own by way of writing letters.

They are written in a personal code which seems incoherent and illogical to other people but which offered her the possibility to communicate in her own way. The hermetic character of the letters is being used by Velter as a metaphor for the inaccessible; on top of that, it provides a parallel to the world of the arts, where artists also create their own language in order to give shape to their vision of the world.