The Belgian artist Jan Samyn (Kortrijk, West Flanders) is a pre-eminent storyteller. He is constantly writing, reading, drawing and coming up with new ideas.As he writes, he sketches imaginary machines based on a labyrinthine order of words, images, symbols and...
Read MoreThe Belgian artist Jan Samyn (Kortrijk, West Flanders) is a pre-eminent storyteller. He is constantly writing, reading, drawing and coming up with new ideas.
As he writes, he sketches imaginary machines based on a labyrinthine order of words, images, symbols and colours.
It is in that complexity that he prefers to hide, as an eternal nomad, restlessly on a quest. Samyn has kept his studio in Maastricht (Holland) since 2013, which also serves as the starting point for the world tour of his project Ma Machine d´Emotions. Exhibitions were already held in Cascais (PT), Maastricht (NL), Resana (IT) and Lisbon (PT).
Ma Machine d´Emotions’ is the story of a man wrestling with how to express his emotions, who then builds a gigantic, unbelievably complex machine in which he conceals a special emotion that only she for whom it is intended will be able to discover: a secret message meant for one particular person hidden amidst the organised chaos of 523 different emotions.
The story centres on a gigantic man figure depicted kneeling on a wooden chair, who clasps an enormous humming top in his claws, on which the 523 emotions are classified according to a complex order of prime numbers, categories, colours, symbols, languages and texts. Detailed pen drawings depict the machine and the man and the individual emotions and their interconnections.
