Hugo Roelandt

"From action / performance to the study of MOVEMENT: the videoregistration of mechanical 'auto mobile' objects (toy cars) who chose their own movement and randomly form a colour-composition for the public." - Hugo Roelandt

< Marchandise, Montevideo, Antwerp, April '83

< Ex, Brussels, May '83

< Parkeren in De Singel, De Singel, Antwerp, August '85

A.M.A.P. is a mobile composition in which the role of the different objects is stressed. A given quantity of colour-elements – framed in glass – moves in contrast to the background. A video-camera registers the resulting variations in colour and the relation with the movement which becomes visible underneath. Three colour-elements are equally represented but they chose their own rhythm and place and so form a composition that is projected on a videoscreen. Movement is created by an electro-chemical reaction. The elements themselves define the colouring. Where the electro-chemical reaction ends, the order is fixed. The static square in which the elements evolve contrasts with the colour-dynamics in it. The elements and their accidental combination don’t carry any symbolic meaning but simply accentuate the auto-mechanical development of the composition. ‘Auto’ refers here – like in ‘autodidact’ – to ‘self’, ‘self propelling’. A.M.A.P. refuses the imposed and fixed patterns of artistic products. It questions the meaning of an art that wants to represent something.

(Abstracts from Hugo Roelandt: Let's Expand The Sky, red. Mark Holthof, Occasional Papers, London, 2016)