Crafts & Light

Sacrificing sperm whales to produce spermaceti candles, a business culminating in the light measuring unit ‘candela’. Rainbows. A decadent turtle hibernating during the Little Ice Age in Antwerp. A secret love letter to a deviating Habsburg emperor. Etc.

Kasper Bosmans is known as an artist for far-fetched work with far-fetched stories. For a continuity of the circulation of tales in untraditional ways, reimagined by illogical materials. Bosmans stays in storyteller mode in Fondation CAB, but shows himself eager to overturn surface readings and uncover a driving unease, not to say pain. The nesting of plots and biological bits in the artist’s symbolic and schematic style can increasingly be understood as a processing device for a larger underlying narrative, perhaps even a philosophy.

In works that entertain surfaces for the sake of what (subtly and sensibly) hides, sleeps or waits behind, Bosmans shifts the weight of his work’s eloquence, exploiting the appeal of information to muse about the defense mechanisms of complicated subjects and objects.

In addition to key works from recent shows and private collections, the exhibition will present a suite of new marble works. These pieces are the result of a year-long residency at the natural stone company Van Den Weghe, celebrating a decade of ping-pong between artist and artisan.