QUESTIONS :

WHY DO YOU MAKE ART ?
WHAT DOES ART MEAN TO YOU ?
WHAT IS YOUR NOTION OF QUALITY ?

 JAN VERCRUYSSE:

Quality. In Flemish it reads "kwaliteit", so it must be quite the same.
It has to do with tradition, I think.
Traditional people, for instance, say that the highest quality shoes are hand-made English shoes. They last forever. One could walk with one pair of those shoes from early modernism right into postmodernism, and beyond.
They are also very, very expensive.
Then, I guess, quality has to do with "quality-like".
For instance, a young painter who starts painting on cotton canvas because he is poor and cotton is cheap. Then, getting richer because people buy his paintings and his dealer gives him some of that money, he starts painting on linen canvas which is said to be of better quality, and much more expensive. The same must be true for the paint he is using, and much more expensive. So far so good.
But then, from another point of view, do you seriously think a woman would think of her lover as being "high quality" ( that is, if he is any good ) ? No, she wouldn't. And if she does, we would call her a very strange woman or maybe a post-modern woman.

from: ARTISTS TALK in Flash Art News, Supplement to Flash Art N° 143, 1988

JAN VERCRUYSSE, born in Elisabethville (Belgian Congo) in 1948, lives and works in Western Europe.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY SOLO

* Museum Hedendaagse Kunst, Gent, 1982 [ Text by Jan Hoet ] .
* ARC, Musée de 1'Art Moderne, Paris, 1986 [ Text ( Le Seuil et L'Obstacle) by Alain Cueff ].
* Edizione Pieroni, Roma, 1957 [ Text by Jan Hoet ].
* Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussel, 1983 [ Texts : Précis de Decomposition by Marianne Brouwer / Le même côté du mìroir by Alain Cueff.
* Tombeaux ( Stanza ), Lisson Gallery, London, 1989.
* Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, 1989 ( published 1999 ).
* Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1990 [ Texts : XIV  sketches for Tombeaux (Stanza) by Alain Cueff / Of Quantitative Existence or the attribution and distribution of remains by Denis Zacharopoulos ].
* Jan Vercruysse, Edizioni Pieroni, Roma, 1990.
* Tombeaux (Stanza), Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, 1992.
* Biennale di Venezia - Padiglione del Belgio, 1993 [ Texts by Alain Cueff & Jan Debbaut ].
* Jan Vercruysse, Senza Progetto, CARTE # 2, Messina, Pnmavera 1993. [ Texts by Cecilia Casorati & Giovanni Iovane ].
* The Villas - Museum Haus Lange & Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, 1995 [ Text by Pier Luigi Tazzi ].
* Jan Vercruysse, Galleria Tucci Russo, Torre Pellice, 1996 [ Text by Pier Luigi Tazzi ].
* Jan Vercruysse / Portraits by the Artist / Yves Gevaert & Ludion, Ghent, 1998. [ Text by Pier Luigi Tazzi ].
* Jan Vercruysse / Maggio 1998 / Galleria Gianluca Collica / Catania, 1998 [ Text by Giovanni Iovane ].