Ante Timmermans
(Ninove,
1976 )
In performances, installations and especially drawings, Ante Timmermans reflects on his surroundings, urban structures and social systems. He reacts to the unbridled freedom of contemporary man – the ‘homo nonsens’ – which has resulted in absurdity, banality and confusion. Timmermans lives and works alternately in Ghent and Zurich, the city where Dadaism – with its rejection of conventional norms and values – developed after the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. Despite Timmermans’s critical attitude, his work is poetically charged and not without hope. Language is an important element. Timmermans’s images emerge in the wake of an ever-moving stream of associations. While these indicate a certain direction of thought, they offer no redeeming explanation. Nor does the artist himself escape the existential confusion he thematises. He does not believe that the search for meaning ever ends and so he lets the viewer wander without direction in the ‘mind map’ his images provide.
