"For those who are not so familiar with my work, it is about relationships between light, shadow and gestures of turning things inside & out, upside down, front to back. It's about me and the other, about both visible and invisble forces... It speaks fort itself."
A series of large gold monochromes is facing the entrance of the exhibition space. On closer scrutiny In Case of Emergency turns out to consist of rescue blankets which have been mounted and framed: an obvious mimicry of minimal painting and conceptual art. Yet the result –both profane and sacral, tactile and aural- is more than a clever tongue-in-cheek quotation of art history. Van Simaey unfolds what is normally hidden from sight and gives it a space of its own.
These notions -of folding and unfolding, of mirroring and reflecting, of taking things apart and putting them back together, just slightly altered- are present throughout the exhibition. Beep is a re-creation of the artist’s personal library, for which he has intentionally shredded his book collection in order to make paper fo a new, abstracted, collection of books . The title is both referring to the Dutch word for library (bibliotheek) and to a sound suggesting a void or hidden information. Another new sculpture consists of different folded objects (among which a bed, a chair a bicycle and a shirt) leaning against eachother. Although their appearance is unpretentious, the seamingly coincidental accumulation of these objects is suggestive of an altogether different habitat.
Hiding in Plain Sight is an intricate constellation of new works, consisting of materials that are (as they are) quite unambitious. Van Simaey has the ability of recreating these things as themselves but with a new, unexpected capacity. Simple objects become rich in meaning as they are rearranged to create another language and space and eventually into a visual poetry.