Ritsart Gobyn, 'In Between'

Published: Posture Editions, 2020
Text: Tom Van Imschoot

192 pages, 30 x 21 cm, hardcover, English
ISBN: 97894912622401

Ritsart Gobyn (b. 1985) explores the boundaries of our perception in a subtly subversive way. His paintings on rough, unprimed canvas are covered with shreds of paper, smears and stains, tape, traces of pencil, dirt and dust. They are the traces of the creative process that have gathered on the canvas, while lying on the studio floor. The more attentively we look at the paintings, the more we start to doubt what we observe. The tape turns out to be a painted trompe l’oeil, as are the shreds of paper. What about the other traces? The perception tilts from accidental to deliberate, from reality to illusion, from process to product, and back again.

With this book Posture Editions aims to plunge deeper into this changing perception and seeks to touch the skin of the paint, page by page. Some key works will be scanned in high resolution and presented in full-scale reproduction. As reader, you wander through the razor-sharp landscape of the painting, and through its details, the materiality and the illusion, a complete image gradually starts to form.
The book zooms in to the intimacy of the studio, it touches the painterly illusion and zooms out again to the objectified distance of the exhibition space.

For an artist, a book not only offers new insights into his or her own practice, but can also broaden his or her horizons and form the basis for future collaborations.