David Boon

Visual artist

Lives and works in Boechout / Antwerp

David Boon’s art practice starts with what he calls ‘one cuts’: cut-outs from magazines – preferably several decades old. What interests him is the pure form – and what it can release or convey. His gaze falls on an image fragment, a part of the whole that becomes a composition within the frame of his eye. He collects these one cuts and occasionally repeats them, turns them, holds them up to the light. With a few manipulations, he arrived at Form 3, which serves as the foundation, germ and essence of much of his oeuvre.

However, the form is never static. Not only does it find various expressions, it evolves over time. Each new variation is a connection between past and present. The form is at once a mo-ment pic-ture or fragment – a snapshot in the same way that ‘one cuts’ are – and constantly in motion. In all successive forms, and manipulations of the forms, a genealogy unfolds. None of them are com-pletely separate from each other. They lead their own lives, but as members of a family from which they cannot escape. Each variation can lead to another, but one will carry more ramifications fur-ther than the other.

Just through his own experiments with variations, he invites us to look differently, engage our im-aginations and let the gaze guide us. It takes time and a bit of courage to open our gaze, break outside that rectangular frame and think around it: what is out there? What do we not see – how can we look? What life and meaning each variation of a form then takes on is the responsibility of the viewer: how do we look, how do we show, how do we order our lives around the Form?

Represented by Base-Alpha Gallery