Sterrendoek

Appearing at first glance as a piece of formalist abstraction,Sterrendoek (Star Canvas) exposes artist and educator Jef Geys’s enduring skepticism of visual modes of knowledge production. Geys reproduces on a painterly background the Nazi-issued chart of badges that marked bodies in concentration camps. This demonstrates how the repetition of certain shapes and colors structures and restructures our perception of reality. The artist problematizes the correlation between visual forms and meanings, as well as the supposed neutrality of art. This work also reveals the ambivalent role of the grid as a vehicle for both articulation and repression. “For me,” Geys has asserted, “nothing is so binding as the laws of the grid. . . . Grids are there because we need to speak, because rules and laws try to dominate our traffic [sic].”