‘OEEEEEEUUUUVVRE’: Peter Morrens solo at M

‘OEEEEEEUUUUVVRE’

Peter Morrens solo at M

Over the past 35 years, Peter Morrens has built up an oeuvre that is as multifaceted as it is elusive. You can explore it in M during his first large-scale solo museum exhibition. A career overview?

Peter Morrens: "That’s not how I see it. Together with the people at M, I thought long and hard about how to structure the exhibition. I want there to be a rhythm to it: an alternation between densely filled and more open spaces, of different viewing directions and presentation methods – of curling up and stretching out, a bit like an accordion. I see the exhibition as a Gesamtkunstwerk. You’ll get an overview, of course, but hopefully the main thing you’ll gain is insight."

Peter Morrens (b. 1965) lives and works in Antwerp and teaches at the LUCA School of Arts in Ghent. Solo exhibitions include Club Solo, (Breda, 2023), Valerie Traan Gallery (Antwerp, 2022), de Warande (Turnhout, 2021), Les Brasseurs Art Contemporain (Liège, 2017), Loods 12 (Wetteren, 2016) and Art Page Gallery (New York, 2000). He is represented by Kristof De Clercq Gallery in Ghent, where he regularly exhibits.

Peter Morrens was co-founder and artistic leader (together with Rik De Boek) of artists’ initiative Voorkamer in Lier between 1996 and 2016.

His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including S.M.A.K. Ghent, the Flemish Community Collection and M Leuven. In 2022, Morrens was a guest at the Playground performance festival in Leuven. His work is currently on view in M’s collection exhibition, ‘DOKA’.

www.petermorrens.com

Side by side and intertwined

"The exhibition fills four consecutive rooms on the first floor. These are connected to one another by means of a continuous, 40-meter-long display case. On this will be a print with reproductions of artefacts from M’s collection, but in black and white and on a different scale. On the reproductions are authentic objects from the M collection. Side by side and without direct hierarchy: work from contemporary artists such as Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Luc Deleu, historic art, and objects such as a garter or a spoon."

"This playing with originals and reproductions, with the ‘real’ and the ‘fictitious’, is a common thread running through my work. It sows confusion, which leads to the slowing down that you need to view art."

"I also play with the expectations that visitors have about what they will and will not get to see in a museum. There are labels beside the objects, but viewing is paramount. All too often, we approach art from the question: what did the artist mean? Instead of: how does the viewer experience the work? My role is to entice the viewer. I guide their gaze, unsettle them, challenge a medley of senses… I like to play with the choreography of viewing."

‘Dead end’ (Travestie), Peter Morrens, 2020 © Peter Morrens, photo: We Document Art, courtesy Kristof De Clercq Gallery

Hello

"Apart from this display case, there is a further element that links the rooms to one another: hanging on the wall is a long rail with a moving speaker that slides slowly through the spaces. Through that speaker, you hear me humming a French song from the 1970s – out of tune, because I can’t sing (laughs) – and calling out ‘hello’ a single time. It is as if I’m guiding the visitor through the exhibition with a disembodied voice."

"One room has a window that looks out over the inner courtyard, and there I want to make a connection to the outdoors. The idea is to throw an older work – which consists of the letters n e W – down from M’s roof terrace and to film that on Super 8, an analogue film that can register precisely 3 minutes and 20 seconds of footage. So the material circumscribes what you can do. We’ll shoot it in a single take – even if it rains, or if it’s poorly lit, or whatever. I’ll leave it up to fate to decide. The film will be shown on a screen beside that window."

"I often revisit my own work. Then I deploy a different perspective, an alternative medium, another scale, and so on. I don’t like the idea of linear time. I prefer to disrupt the chronology, the way time is experienced."

RECENT WORK, Peter Morrens, 2024, S8-film van actie op 10 juli 2024, M Leuven © Peter Morrens

In-between language

"Immediate language is a constant in my work. As in ‘Point Blank Press’, a series that has been running since 1997. I start with everyday pronouncements that I overhear – like ‘I’ll come and have a good laugh at your exhibition’, which I once overheard at a private view (laughs). I note them down uncensored – complete with linguistic errors, political incorrectness, terrible jokes, and so on – and then paint them onto graph paper. I see these as drawings. The series now numbers 4,000 drawings, 2500 of which have been digitised and purchased as a slide show by the Flemish Community (S.M.A.K. collection, Ghent). These are projected continuously at M in a computer-controlled order."

"Language is material for me. I like to call it ‘in-between language’. Not as in suburban Flemish, but as language that falls between the cracks, that escapes us, over which we have no control. Indeed, I use such utterances as a basis for the titles of my work. There’s something about it that is at once moving and disruptive."

‘Dusver’, Peter Morrens, 2020, Flemish Community Collection at M Leuven © Peter Morrens, photo: We Document Art, courtesy Kristof De Clercq Gallery

Covers

"I also engage in dialogue with other people’s work. For example in the series ‘Covers’: drawings of reproductions of artworks that I find in books or magazines. I purposely do not exhibit them as copies, but as interpretations. Sometimes the number of the image is noted alongside, or you see just part of the work, or there’s a shadow falling across it… A connoisseur might perhaps say: ‘ha, an early Tuymans!’, but that’s not the point. For me, it’s more about viewing the work than about the work itself."

"All my work arises from perception. ‘Directions’, the campaign image for the exhibition, makes this clear. My starting point for that work was a photo I once took of a road sign beside a Flemish highway. I turned it into a print, which I subsequently manipulated and painted. But that original photo actually contained everything that typifies my work. It incorporates linguistic play, humour… And have you noticed that there was once a straight arrow on the sign? This was painted over by contractors later on, but in a subtly different blue, which renders the overpainting visible – so the image points to its own materiality."

"We named the exhibition ‘OEEEEEEUUUUVVRE’ – after a work which is not included in the exhibition, but which people can see in M’s new collection presentation on the floor below. I wanted to emphasise the hesitant tone that you hear when you say it aloud. I then converted it into wooden letters on a rack – into an object, therefore. But because the letters lean against one another, and almost topple over, the object retains some of the doubt in the phonetic representation. I also designed the cover of this magazine, and for that I also took ‘OEEEEEEUUUUVVRE’ as my starting point. With a wink, needless to say. Humour as an exalted form of despair (laughs)."

‘Richtingen’, Peter Morrens, 2020, Collectie Vlaamse Gemeenschap bij M Leuven — ‘Richtingen’, Peter Morrens, 2020, Flemish Community Collection at M Leuven, photo: We Document Art, courtesy Kristof De Clercq Gallery

To be continued

"At the end, visitors can go to the second floor, where there’s a panoramic view of the city. There, I exhibit a few of my own works – such as an automatically rotating carousel of postcards with reproductions of works that have not made it into the exhibition – but above all, I invite people to kick back and listen. I’ve put together a playlist with a lot of jazz and other musical fragments, a few poems, Steve Reich repeating and thus transforming a politically charged fragment of text for 13 whole minutes, and so on. I’m mainly interested in the transitions between the fragments: which send you from one emotion to another. In the audio guide – an unsettling text that I wrote myself – I point this out: please stay until you’ve heard two fragments. I hope to engender a desire in the visitor to stay. And, as the comedian Karl Valentin once said: ‘At the end the lock clicks into place’ (laughs)."