Tim Segers

Tim Segers cutting and folding a concrete lady's shoe (hier snijdt Segers een betonnen, sexy muiltje)

 

Hans Theys


Strutting for Space
Some words about a sculptural intervention by Tim Segers


Tim Segers is a visual artist living in the Belgian city of Antwerp. A gifted draughtsman since childhood, he developed new skills as a sculptor during the last years. Two years ago, during a stay at an art academy in Greece, he learned how to knot fishing nets. Pretty soon he was throwing and knotting nets around small buildings, allowing him to climb them freely. Last year he made several sculptures with wooden ladders and by devices that prevented people from using doors and seemed to stabilise buildings or walls. The first version of this “strutting” consisted of taking away the inside doorknobs of all the doors leading out of a big room. One could get in, but not out. This intervention recurred some time later in the Brussels art centre Vetro, where he arrived with a portable strutting device which allowed him to strut and block a door in less than a minute.
“It’s amazing,” he says, “without my ever having planned it, all my interventions seem to evolve around similar themes. They are always about limiting, defining and surmounting space. I only realized this recently, while taking photographs of a wallpainting I made some years ago. The painting represents an apple. It is about two metres tall and it is painted directly on the walls in the corner of a large space. The bottom of the apple was painted on the flour. Seen from a certain distance, the proportions of the apple fit. Seen from close, one notices that the bottom is deformed. It’s “too long” and it’s shortened by an optical illusion. Space is tricked. The room is defined by the image. In my view, my work with the ladders, the nets and the struts boils down to the same, almost unconscious theme.’
Last month Segers “strutted” an exhibition space in the Belgian town of Hasselt, in a space called Z33. (He had been invited by the artist Philip Janssens.) Visiting this venue, Segers had noticed a white cubicle that had been added to the space. Because of his experience with constructing exhibition devices for the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, he knew how this cubicle was constructed. He opened the “walls”, took out beams that were not really necessary, and used them to strut the cubicle.
For all its economy and technical precision, this was a beautiful intervention. But the way Segers has executed it, makes it really amazing. The only thing he brought with him from the outside world were some beautiful wedges. The construction was beautiful, economic and poetic at the same time. A tour de force.
Now Segers has been invited to do an intervention for Borderline, an art initiative in Luxemburg, that proposed some small houses on the border of this country to be worked with by artists. One of these houses is situated on the border of a road, in a curb, with descending land on its backside. Segers proposes to create an island for this house. With the help of a bulldozer he is going to eat away some land and part of the road in front of it, just to dump it on the slope in the back. This way the small house will be stabilised. It will be strutted in the back. And it will find itself on a safe island, cut of from the surrounding world.
It is indeed beautiful to se how this new project resembles the painting of the round apple in the corner of a room or the taking away of the doorknobs of all the doors leading out of a large space. At the same time a kind of lighthouse will be created. A look out. A surmounted obstacle. A safe house of dreams.


Montagne de Miel, March 2nd 2007

ESSAYS BY HANS THEYS

Strutting for Space, 2007

Bonnie en Clyde, 2006