Bart Stolle
Bart Stolle is primarily known for his animated films in which familiar situations from everyday life are transposed to a two-dimensional world using an elementary, geometric visual language. The rustling leaves of a tree evoked by altering digits, a figure (is it the mother?) sitting next to the bed of a sick child, a man fishing, surrounded by waving plants and passing animals.
Stolle drafts his animations frame by frame. By using this traditional method of stop-motion he places himself in a slow process in which, by an extreme distillation of form, he tries to reduce reality to its essence. Referring to the early twentieth-century art movement Suprematism, this essence is of a meta-physical nature and wants to suggest the non-visible through elementary forms.
Balance is a central focus in Stolle’s oeuvre and is linked to the importance of imagination and an ecological way of thinking; two elements characterizing his working process in which choices are made with great carefulness.
As an answer to today’s media saturation, Stolle’s contemporary animism stands for a return to a more involved and emotional way of viewing. Humor hereby often acts as a universal ‘trigger’.
Next to this animated films, Bart Stolle makes paintings that are build up with the same accurate slowness. Black and white works, in which the imagery of the animations has come to a standstill are in contrast to new, large canvasses consisting of a multitude of small, tingling forms in different colors recalling the structure of a musical score or large city plans. While looking at this works time is visualized through an architectural language.