My mother and I are colouring in cows at the Wiels coffee shop. We found the cows, together with a box of colours, on our way out of the Jef Geys exhibition, curated by Charlotte Friling and Dirk Snauwaert. My mum calls her cow Chantal, I call mine Jackie. We take them home.
To make colouring-in central to one's artist practice is quite funny. Geys (1934-2018) was a funny guy, and if there's something like Belgian humour, I would say it's his. His Colouring Book for Adults had several topics of importance (in the 1960s, and, as nothing much changes, now) such as naked women, maps and geopolitical borders, the model home, human anatomy, the soldier, consumer commodities, the automobile.
The cow pics that we coloured in, belonged to Geys' Cow Passports-series. Obviously, cows are female, and so is the "you stupid cow!" Filling in the passports, with name, date, dress and gender, is a sort of feminism, I would like to think, in a warped kind of way. Same counts for !Women’s Questions?, a project that Geys started in the early 1960s on the wall of his school classroom (he was an artist/teacher), where he gathered on a large roll of brown wrapping paper the questions that are asked to women, collected from newspapers and magazines. It is wide range from "Women in politics: how to do it" to “How does one avoid one becoming a kitchen slave?”
Colouring-in is also part of Geys' Fruit sculptures. A plum, a banana, cherries and grapes materialise in shapes that only vaguely allude to their real form. They were personalised by the buyer who was asked to chose a colour for the sculpture based on standard car paint like ‘Peugeot Yellow’ and ‘Porsche Black’. The combination of fruit and car creates a lush, sensual object, painted, as Geys' himself wrote, "as if it were a battle steed, bridal carriage, battering-ram, luxury yacht, rooftop apartment, Versace suit or gyro cheque."
Geys' show is full of material and my mum and I enjoyed nosing around in it. Following the wish of the artist, there are no labels of explanations in the exhibition. This might not work in most cases, but with Jef Geys, it tends to make you more curious, and also a little excited about what you can find out on your own.
Two things that my eye fell upon: the Kempens Informatieblad, a local newspaper that Geys hijacked after its failing in 1971, taking it over for his own purposes and initially distributing it door-to-door in his home town Balen. Also a row of black document folders on a high shelf caught my attention as they are were sealed off in plastic foil, which triggered the historian in me.
Two weeks after our visit, I ask my mum if she can take a good picture of our cows. She says she can't because she cut them into pieces. They were too big to keep in her desk. Now she is going to use them for her "boodschappenlijstjes" (shopping lists). My mum is a creative but also a practical person. I think Geys would have appreciated her approach.
