INSIDE THE BOOK TOWER

For the exhibition World Wide Wonders, nine national and international artists were invited to create a work of art on the basis of an object from one of the collections of the Ghent University. Ghent-based artist Stijn Cole visited the Book Tower's map room, where the Recollecting Landscapes project caught his eye.
In 1904, 1980 and 2004, three photographers – Massart, Charlier and Kempenaers - took pictures of the same variety of locations all across Flanders, revealing how Flanders continuously urbanized and how the landscape constantly evolved. From this series of images Stijn Cole picked out the landscape that had changed the least and went there to make yet another picture from the same angle as his three predecessors, shooting two photos with a one minute interval.
 
These two photos constitute the basis of his paintings. He abstracted the two snapshots into a sequence of 256 colours (from light to dark). The changes of light gradually revealed slight differences between the two images, despite the brief interval, resulting in two slightly different paintings.
Light, colour and time are the basic material of Cole's work. In the showcase next to this is shown how the colours of the air evolve in a week's time. In order to reveal this, he took pictures of the air every minute during one week, transferring the photos to the average colour and putting them together into time bars of one day each, with a total of 7, the first week of spring 2009.