Fred Eerdekens is best known for his acclaimed work using light and shadow, which he has been producing for almost fifteen years. These works employ the focused beams of theatre lights trained on a range of carefully manipulated materials to create poetic shadow texts on the surrounding walls and floor.

For this exhibition, the artist will be debuting ‘forever’, a new piece that creates reflections on the wall cast by materials scattered across the floor in the gallery’s main space. The inherent unpredictability of the reflective materials becomes an essential part of the installation, causing what the artist calls an “aleatory apparition” of text to hover ambiguously on the wall.

This use of reflection marks a new departure in the artist’s work, and a deepening of his explorations of the fugitive poetry of light, language, material, and knowledge – an investigation with a tradition stretching back to Plato and the very beginnings of philosophy. Eerdekens’ work points out the fragility of the linguistic contract, and how our very perception of the world depends on a set of conventions that can at best be described as provisional.

Alongside the installation in the main space, the gallery will also be featuring a new shadow-text piece by the artist that uses light shining on the manipulated branches of a group of trees, a new piece from Eerdekens’ celebrated copper wire sentence series, and a set of new silverpoint drawings.

Fred Eerdekens lives and works in Hasselt, Belgium. The artist was recently honored with a major retrospective and accompanying catalog, ‘The Retina Diamond’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp. Other recent exhibitions include Drawings/Works on Paper at Spencer Brownstone Gallery; The Ambiguity of the Image, Belgian art now at Art Athina, Athens; ‘Shadow Play’, H.C. Andersen Bicentennial, Odense, Denmark; as well as a major public sculpture commission as part of the ABC2004 festival in Antwerp, Belgium.