Ronnie van Hout’s artistic originality is sustained by his self irony and the cryptic humour with which he dismantles subjects such as finding identity, cultural affiliation and the search for self-realisation, all of which are usually so resistant to humour. Often the installations resemble distorted self-portraits of the artist, who appears within his own works in diverse forms.
Van Hout’s installation in Studio 3 of the Künstlerhaus, for example, is devoted to memory and demonstrates – using an example from his own childhood – the impossibility of recalling one’s own history as a description of facts, since it is always filtered through the sediment of subsequent feelings and influences. In reality, the memory that he illustrates in his work is only a substitute.
Van Hout not only loves Heavy Metal and films about body snatchers and zombies, but also Elvis imitators and Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”. So the audience can expect to be offered a mixture of bizarre figures and constellations as a “substitute”.
“‘Ersatz’ with its actual objects offers a ‘poor’ substitute for reality but seeks redemption by representing an aspect of van Hout’s junk-store warehouse of ‘bad’ memory.”(Ronnie van Hout)
