Thought forms, the first personal exhibition in Belgium by London-based artist Damien Roach, will be held in three areas of the gallery: the two rooms on the ground floor and the back yard. Roach's work is essentially based on research and the study of perception. For this purpose, he employs various means including video, sculpture, drawing, installation and collage, inviting us to explore various trajectories depending on our own perception.
Roach chooses to present his works so that our own experience, via the areas of the gallery, unleashes reflections about the concepts of presentation, certainty as well as resurgence and memory.
Roach manages to create a dynamic situation that draws on the mind and the experience of the visitor. The various media used (video, sculpture, collage, drawing and sound) are therefore components of a precisely-orchestrated environment where the mere movement from one area to another activates a series of subtle mental echoes.
Each work would be seen as a leitmotiv or as a modified piece of the same jigsaw puzzle. Various works already encountered during the visit appear repeated yet in a slightly new form.
Starting with the tower of Lego bricks, or with versions of "officially" the world’s funniest joke, we see subtle changes, which the mind fails to notice initially. Was the joke printed on pink paper? Or orange? Or was it a different colour? And is the wording exactly the same this time? How can that be checked, and can we be 100% certain?
Is this wooden floor identical to the one in the other exhibition room? And now that I think about it, is that old scar on my left hand or my right? Here, the complex relationships between what we see now in the present, what we saw just a moment ago and what we are about to see in the near future are thrown into relief - simultaneously combined and remote, joined and broken.
Perhaps we are not merely being asked to look, but to look and think and then look again.