This and Thatness

Can an object be the shadow of itself ? This is the question Vincent Scheers seems to be asking in this exhibition. For him, objects have long had a coefficient of danger. In his works their emotional and fictional charges are stretched to the maximum. Vincent Scheers has no intention of leaving objects in the tranquility of their banality. We often find ourselves facing his works like collectors in search of fetishes. The materials, shapes, and textures are familiar and peaceful, yet everything seems to shift into the strange harshness of emptiness and anxiety. While his objects are not readymades, they are not simply sculptures either. They reflect our stories and some of our dreams or fears. But can this danger be turned against the objects themselves? Can we put them at risk of their own definition, transforming them into fleeting shadows, frightening melancholic memories of themselves? Can the overemphasis of its function cause the object itself to cease existing? In this series of new works, Vincent Scheers grants himself the right to pursue us into intimate spaces injected with personal memories. In the work Het kompromis (the compromise) (2025), an old table is pierced with several holes to the point of becoming almost a shadow of a table. The object, which is the very symbol of the encounter, seems to have amalgamated all its memories within itself. How many stories have already passed through this table before it gained this other status at the risk of itself? The delicate precision and strange sensitivity to memory in Vincent Scheers’ stories is also evident in Workaholic (2024). Achieved through a mixture of lacquer and soil, a shovel appears to be covered in mud. Now overgrown by that which it once shoveled, the tool freezes the definition of its use in a strange, suspended moment. The object carries its own memory to the detriment of its use: its function defining it to such an amount it paradoxically obstructs itself from fulfilling its purpose. In the work POV (2025), anxiety characteristic of the artist's works echoes the nightmares of our childhood. Windows are broken apart and condensed into a constructivist structure. The elements interlock, deprived of their previously protective properties. While this shift may be unsettling, it also opens poetic possibilities. In How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained (2025), for example, our gaze is challenged by our preconceived notions of materials and their potential. We feel a sense of imbalance, a distortion of perception. We seem to be on the edge of what is natural. The object becomes an almost naive vehicle for our desire to see the world differently, to not view it as merely objective and cold. Contrasting Scheers’ prior incorporation of object biographies, Untitled (Friends) (2025) instead uses them as a catalyst to juxtapose the artist’s childhood memories with the concept of This and That. A small, seemingly sophisticated screen is embedded in his grandfather's old drilling stand. Said screen shows an episode of the series “Friends”. Certainly, many have had the impression that a teenage addiction to television had excluded them from their own lives. Closely following the development of fake lives, they ceased to partake in their own. Ironically for Scheers, this inability to partake caused by his fixation on late 1990s TV programs was the one thing he shared with his workshop-consumed grandfather. The distance caused by mass media consumption and labor intensification, which transformed This into That, is thus translated into the visual plane. In his work 1/2 (2025) narratives collide. Its construction process plays on the assembly of disjointed yet familiar elements. A series of river stones cut in half are set on a wooden semicircle sourced from an old mill. For the artist, the work is intrinsically linked to the passing of time. It reflects the compartmentalization of our time by labor and the way in which labor deprives us of it. Akin to the water slowly grinding away at the stones, the mill milling grain at the end of its growth amidst lush fields, the lower jaw emerging from the wall gradually gnaws away at time itself. Faced with the strangeness of the stones and the old structure, we find that other paradox so distinctive to Scheers’ formal vocabulary. Is it a found object, a meticulous construction? Does it date from yesterday, from several decades ago, forgotten at the back of a barn? Is it frightening, or is the half-jaw mocking our dismay? In any case, it seems to form a sarcastic smile. Before us, the shadows have triumphed.