Squeaky Toys Have Feelings Too

Squeaky Toys Don’t Get the Blues

Squeaky Toys Are Humans Too

It deviates, it drifts away, it plays.

It is something entirely different, yet once again, he does what he has always done: searching, playing, exploring. The collected collages, assemblages, and other images in Christophe Coppens’ new exhibition evoke a dream world. It is an artificial world, like those we know from the theater, from operas, from the shop windows and installations tied to the artist’s other lives — staged situations, artificial, like the recurring aquarium in the collages.

Psychologists and psychiatrists tell us that our nightly dreams continue the threads of our daily actions. For Christophe Coppens, it seems that daily life is the continuation of the nightly dream. These images form his answer (even if often posed as a question) to a world where everything seems possible but still must fit within a frame — the frame of the artwork, the aquarium, the gallery. Where is the dream, where is the illusion in all of this? It lies in possibility: everything can always be different.

Deviation, drifting, and play are the strategies he employs in this exhibition, which begins with a gift — the gallery as a workspace, an extension of his studio. From there, he sets off on a path away from tradition, drifting from intention, playing with the situation itself: the artist reclaiming control over the gallery and, in turn, over his own work.

This dream, now turned real, begins two weeks before the opening, when he steps into the gallery to work. This is already a deviation — the gallery shifts from a place where art is sold to a place where art is made. It’s a statement: to do the unseen within the gallery, transforming it into a playground. The artist follows his own path — something entirely new, yet somehow still the same.

Of course, not everything in this exhibition was created here. The three posters — poetic slogans? Slogan-like poetry? — were made by Christophe Coppens together with Erik Desmyter, a printer and collector of historic printing presses in Ghent, on a machine from 1840. Letterpress printing, using wooden type from an old type case. This could only happen there. But traces of earlier works also surface in other pieces. Just as works from this constellation may reappear in future ones.

Christophe Coppens sometimes refers to this as a half-exhibition. The works here are both finished and unfinished. His collages and assemblages are like diaries — scrapbooks of a past meant for the future. What isn’t sold now might be reworked later. Some pieces aren’t even intended for sale. This leads to the question: What does it mean for a work to be finished? Does it even need to be?

Finished or not — half-finished is still finished. And twice half is also whole.

All these repetitions, this sense of the cyclical, appears in the collected images full of magically floating spheres, mountains, frames, and symmetrical landscapes like Rorschach tests. It’s up to the viewer to complete each of these scenes. Again and again. There lies the healing principle — for the artist and the viewer alike — in the openness to a continuation.

In the transition from the artist to the viewer, there is also risk: what here seems to drift off into something transcendent might just as easily veer off course as an accident, or play out as an incident. It’s a moment of letting go. It’s up to the viewer to decide where we are in this process.

There lies the unfinished finishedness, the quirky, stubbornly passed along from the artist’s mind to that of the viewer. That mind, those minds — that’s the space where these works, these raw ingredients for fantasy, are finished.

Or not.

Not yet.