© Vincent Egon Verschueren – Face Space (2021)

Description

Drawing on found imagery from various (media) sources, art (history), television and film, Vincent Egon’s body of work makes use of collaging, editing, layering, framing and cropping within the language of different mediums such as video, photography and painting. The question at hand is to which degree the reality of imagery is actually constructed. By playing one form of representation against the other and by using the language of one medium to create the other, Vincent Egon provides collages or “new imagery” that leaves the spectator with few clues that would allow for an easy identification. Instead, in a witholding and disarmingly stark manner, his work offers another way of looking at the kind of imagery that is presented to us as reality.

Face Space (2021) is a collage that shows the moment right before the face of a Realdoll merges with the Mona Lisa. The work is a reflection on the role of image-reproduction in the objectification of women. On the one hand, there is the image of a Realdoll, a straightforward reproduction and a stereotypical reduction of a woman as an inanimate object with a defined purpose. On the other hand, there is the image of the Mona Lisa, an icon in Western painting whose mysterious smile and gaze has become fully merchandised, making her the most well-known and reproduced image in Western Art History. As a collage placed in a billboard on the street, Face Space literally and metaphorically becomes a multidimensional space, playing with advertisement strategics and its semiotics of women’s imagery.