Ermias Kifleyesus: About People

‘About People’ is a new show by the Belgian artist Ermias Kifleyesus. There is a compulsion in his work as there was with Magritte, to pull an image of the world into the sphere of his work. This is not about a depiction or representation but using fragments from the world to get to grips with or even precipitate the mystery of the reality around us.

Both artists’ worlds are of course very different. in today’s modern society, the world in which Ermias Kifleyesus moves, there are notes like multi-culturalism, migration, globalisation, over-consumption, and the over-population of large cities. They implicitly form the background to which his work relates and the elements the artist appropriates and makes his own.

Ermias Kifleyesus’ art doesn’t want to create something from nothing, from a tabula rasa. rather it engages existing systems, the marks and creations left behind by others. He wants to bring these together, rework, partly erase, select and add to them. in that sense, there is a collective factor present in each piece; he uses other people’s contributions. in this process, in which chance and imperfections play their parts, one image becomes many images, like a filmic sequence of variations giving an insight into the artwork’s creation and degradation. Kifleyesus makes visible and destroys. in his archaeological working method the process takes precedence over the actual image of what is or becomes visible.

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