Philippe Van Wolputte's minimal trash

The young Antwerp artist Philippe Van Wolputte has a thing about asbestos. To say the least. In 2010 he inhaled some of that dangerous substance as a performance at the LISTE art fair in Basel. And for other installations he has not only dug tunnels, but has used piles of rubbish that often contained asbestos. So in a city like Brussels, where there was such a saga about asbestos in the Berlaymont building, Van Wolputte is like a fish in the water. At the Elaine Levy Project he is currently exhibiting a group of works that focus on the now obsolete material. On the Internet he found wrapping for boxes dating from the 1950s. And they are pretty hair-raising today, as the life-threatening effects of asbestos were still unknown at the time. The packaging cheerfully praises the dangerous stuff; one of the posters explains how you can sprinkle the chemical product over your Christmas tree in order to create the effect of an enchanting carpet of snow. Van Wolputte reproduces the packaging in poster format. He does so in black and white, printed on translucent film.
In the other works on display he explores, in a variety of media, various stages in the process of decomposition of asbestos. He presents, for example, a triptych of broken plasterboard panels of a kind from which asbestos was often released in the past. A black and white photograph depicts the artist in the middle of a heap of rubbish during a past performance. In another photograph we can see a close-up of his hands during a similar procedure; the black-and-white copy has been folded a number of times, so that the image contains creases and stripes, thereby conveying the idea of destruction in the work’s own form.

The artist describes his work, appropriately enough, as “minimal trash”. In the middle of the gallery, finally, there is a heap of chunks of asbestos, covered with a plastic tarpaulin which is sealed with sticky tape. Van Wolputte clearly believes in economy of means: the whole exhibition is limited to black, grey, and white. He not only works with original material, but uses it in a consistent way.

Philippe Van Wolputte: Inside, Outside, Downside > 15/12, do/je/Th > za/sa/Sa 14 > 19.00, Elaine Levy Project, 
rue Fourmoisstraat 9, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-534.77.72, www.elainelevyproject.com