Born in Lille in 1970, the French artist Thierry Verbeke is an “activist” artist, rather than a visual artist. As Julien Crenn writes: “It produces an art of peaceful protest, inviting uprising (to collective awareness) rather than revolution” (1). To do this, the artist has no preferred technique, even if he produces videos, photographs or installations, etc. His website also mentions “augmented objects”, namely objects, shapes or signs that the artist has diverted through sometimes minimal interventions. Without neglecting formal issues, he prefers to directly address issues related to the world around him: working conditions, fundamental rights and freedoms, local or global economy, adolescent subcultures, media models, etc. The form adopted by the artist is born from the observed situation and the perceived dysfunction.
How to demonstrate, testify to one’s refusal to submit to a world order that claims to be “natural” or even “a-historical”; what amounts to the same? While being aware of the limits and the real scope of his actions! It is in this narrow and uncomfortable frame that his plastic proposals spread or rather slalom. This is what is at stake in all of Thierry Verbecke’s work; even if the artist formulated it differently, notably with the ironic series Re-injecting politics into daily life, a set of images of Babibel cheeses unpacked and marked with a hammer and a sickle…
Another time, the artist installed a container in the former customs zone between Belgium and France, abolished with European harmonization. He himself moved there temporarily, with posters and palm trees, to open the “PEZ”, the name of a delicious child’s candy and, for the occasion, the acronym used to designate his “Paradise Economic Zone”. : a tax haven, on an abandoned and left fallow area. The artist suddenly made tangible a financial and media reality often evoked, without much explanation, in these times of virtualization of the economy and instability of financial flows; leading to the following questions: How is a tax haven possible? How can a piece of land offer a completely different tax system than the rest of Europe? And why are these borders as porous to financial movements as they are impermeable to tax harmonisations?
(1) Mentioned on http://thierryverbeke.com/textes.html
