UNMOVEMENT: a solo show by Niels ‘Shoe’ Meulman

A video of the creation of the canvases, made by the artist's long-time collaborator Sander Lanen, is shown in the exhibition: the car's engine roars, the paint cans are brutally dislocated and pour color onto the white surfaces, which are cut and purged like open wounds. The performative aspect at the heart of this working method recalls the long line of twentieth-century "action painters". From the Catalan artist Antoni Tapiès, who used so-called "poor" materials, to Pollock, who introduced a different form of gesture through his "dripping" technique, to the interactive approach of the Japanese artists of the Gutai movement, the specificity of Shoe's pictorial action explores not only the pictorial residues left on the canvases, but also the spatial aspect of the creative process. Even the burning of the canvases, reminiscent of Alberto Burri's "Combustioni", among others, bears witness to Shoe's attempt to appropriate elements of historical artistic practice and then transpose them into the contemporary. The traces created by the car's wheels can also be seen as a further development in Shoe's practice.