Olivier DeprezWREK

“One day, Olivier Deprez came across an old strip of Nancy: Nancy goes to the dump to get rid of bulky objects, but brings back even more objects, without knowing what she’s going to use them for. Olivier Deprez has come up with a narrative device. He’s going to clear the floor, salvage, accumulate, destroy, reinterpret and link together a motley collection of images taken from twentieth-century art and found footage from the internet… The whole thing, arranged with obvious subjectivity, is bound to say something.

Images are repeated, destroyed or erased, sequences go backwards. A portrait of Descartes explodes. Pollock in his studio seems lost. Nancy cleans up. Olivier Deprez destroys a heavy legacy and starts again from scratch. The result is raw and simple, requiring a highly personal appropriation.

For each of us, Wrek will be a different, deeply subjective journey through the references summoned up, which we will play at identifying or interpreting without recognising them. Each reference is to be taken as it is, the force of the engraved images and the interplay of references doing the rest, weaving together a set of links that will depend on our personal culture: from Godard, Chantal Ackerman or Nosferatu to the Pink Panther or Donald Duck, from the Arnolfini couple to Cézanne and the reinterpretation of our own work.

Something ends when Wrek begins. Our old way of arranging images in sequences is broken. Deprez sets out to destroy it and tries to find a new way of talking about the world around us, about the arts, their history and their narrative capacities. Engraving and cutting do not create a story but a multitude of links, a unique reading experience, a journey.”