Elke Andreas Boon (Ghent, Belgium) creates photos, drawings, sculptures, and video work. From these she makes installations, in which she confronts the various works with one another. During the late 90’s, Boon became known for her fragile photographic portraits. After a first, and sometimes deceivingly ‘pretty’ impression, a delicate, and often hard reality permeates through her images.
The base of Boon’s work is formed by her innate fascination with people, their emotions and uncertainties. As an artist, her power lies in locating difficult to define human sensitivities, laying them bare, and raising them to a level of aesthetic awareness. Her work couples a poetic and escapist imagination with a raw vision on our human condition. There is no perfection in the world that Elke Andreas Boon creates. It is a world filled with doubts and blemishes, and precisely because of this, also of beauty, and senses of freedom.
By assembling her photos, drawings, videos, and sculptures in the same space, Elke Andreas creates an environment where hyper-individualistic feelings are sublimated into a sense of ephemeral beauty.
Elke Andreas Boon’s work continually investigates the qualities that make us human. Tensions created in answering, or escaping, from patterns of social expectation, which revolve around age, beauty, or gender always reoccur in Boon’s work. After an initially beautiful, often sensual impression of her creations, another reality can soon surface, confronting the spectator with an indeterminate doubt about human fate.
Her work thus bears witness to a very personal sensibility. Due to a constant scanning of the conflict zones that lie between individual and community, the artist touches a very painful, sensitive spot with many people.The insights Boon creates through her work are not easily interpreted. Her work is not the illustration of an idea, but the result of multiple and diverse impulses that form an ambiguous whole.
For Elke Andreas Boon, artistry is a radical choice for freedom, an attempt to go beyond the tethering of social structures. Thanks to her imagination and rebellious attitude towards life, she succeeds in challenging rusted patterns, generating new insights on what it is to be human.
From : Tanguy Eeckhaut, January 2012
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