Pas perdu(s) - Peter Buggenhout

About

«It is commonplace to accept material things in our surroundings rather only as tools, contraptions, goods, or products. Things are primarily functional and do not exist for themselves. Quotidian encounters with residual visual representations that we discard render our experiences increasingly disembodied and placeless. In contrast, the sculptures by the internationally renowned artist Peter Buggenhout (BE, 1963) vehemently counter that we too are a physical and transient thing among things. His artworks oppose the digital experience that is marked by rapid appearance and disappearance: instead, the sculptures demand exploration of their materiality from all angles. While we follow this demand, they assert their peculiar opposition as well as an instant and permanent otherness within the space.

Buggenhout’s sculptures are made of waste and discarded remnants, things that have lost their function and are made into new entities. He employs scrapped shelves, plastic pipes, tarpaulin, quilts, marble slabs, corrugated cardboard, metal struts from blinds, a shop window, dust from an industrial vacuum cleaner, as well as organic materials including pigs blood, cows stomach, and horsehair. The artist merges these disparate materials to create hybrid clusters and bodies to show that discarded things do not merely disappear, rather they return in a zombified reincarnation.

The sculptures remind of unknown structures and ruins of mystifying machines and paraphernalia. Primarily, however, they present an autonomous opposite that is uncanny in its paradoxical similarity and difference. The enormous corporeal nature of the sculptures, which also emit peculiar smells, attract attention, yet the viewer may approach them with caution as they emanate potential danger too. Through this interplay between attraction and repulsion Buggenhout’s works manage to fill the space with a cryptic atmosphere. At every turn, something eerie sitting just beneath the surface of the material world emerges from these fascinating sculptures.»

By Holger Kube Ventura, Director of the Reutlingen / Konkret Art Museum.
Extract from the catalog Peter Buggenhout: nicht geheuer / Peter Buggenhout: strange, 2021. Editor: Holger Kube Ventura for the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret.