represented by

Kusseneers Gallery
De Burburestraat 11
2000 Antwerp
Belgium
www.kusseneers.com

LOCUSLUX Gallery,
Brouwersgracht 51
1015 Amsterdam
The Netherlands
www.locusluxams.com

It's like standing with your nose against the wall. You can see the wall, yet at the same time you can't. You can see its colour, its structure, but the wall itself remains hidden. This brings to mind another situation: it's possible to focus so hard on something, that you no longer know what you are focussing on—the image in your mind does not become clearer, rather it tends to become blurred. It's like when you concentrate very hard on a particular thought, and as a result you lose it, like it detaches itself from you. Actually, blurriness need not be the contrary of clarity: it can also be an extension of clarity—an emphatic clarity that results from an utterly consequent form of thinking that causes the clarity to evaporate.

A similar structure underlies the art of Stefan Annerel (b. 1970). Annerel isolates motifs he borrows from everyday images (advertisement photographs, patterns of textiles,... i.e. all sorts of images trouvées) and blows them up to such a size that they are no longer recognisable. Or rather: to such a size that they just become unrecognisable, because looking at these images amounts to balancing between seeing and not seeing, to anticipating the slight shock of sudden recognition, which, however, usually does not follow—but only just. Annerel's images are like words that are on the tip of one's tongue. And there they stay, eluding us. It's like being almost happy, because we almost overcome a failing memory.

But in Annerel's game of knowing and recognizing, the stakes are much higher. The fundamental issue in this instance, is how art relates to reality—how the image relates to the object that is being depicted. It's about the illusion that causes fiction and reality to merge seamlessly.

There are, however, two types of illusions. There is the illusion that relates to reality: the trompe l’œil, the illusion which deceives the senses and which makes it possible for a work of art (say, a painting) to claim to be something real instead of something artificial. A landscape painting pretends to be a landscape, but actually it merely consists of pigments on canvas. An abstractly formulated idea is not the idea, but its expression.
Annerel is only indirectly preoccupied with this sort of illusion. But at the heart of his work, there is a strange paradox that is indeed important: the more something resembles reality, the greater the illusion; the more successful the work emulates reality, the more successful its artificiality—i.e. the more it distinguishes itself from reality. Like you want to look at a wall from a short distance.

An illusion that belongs to the second category does something with this paradox. It is an illusion that not only relates to reality, but also to itself, to its deceptive qualities. Self-conscious, it refers to the tense relation between that which seems to be and that which really is. It glosses itself as illusion. And Annerel's illusions precisely belong to this category. Their deceptiveness does not simply reside in their pretending to be something they are not—it is total.