Personal memory, historical knowledge, and ways of remembering take form in André de Vanny’s latest body of work, negotiating between the weight of the past and the instability of the present. Both linear and cyclical, Mantle unfolds as a repository of memory, storytelling, and iconography through which de Vanny explores how we recall and make sense of our experiences.
Slipping between abstraction and figuration, Mantle asserts the body as a vehicle for storytelling, grounded in diverse material approaches and more direct mark-making. Suspended between presence and absence, de Vanny’s unidentified figures emerge within fragmented narratives; feverish and half-remembered, aching to be seen and felt, yet never fully realised. His loose compositions echo the unstable sensation of recalling a childhood memory, where detail often gives way to the emotional afterimage of lived experience.
We tend to view historical and biographical material as part of a continuum, yet de Vanny offers a field of experimentation that draws from collective and individual experiences related to the impacts of violent histories. Many of the canonical subjects of pre-modern art, particularly of the Western canon, were those of suffering, conflict, and destruction. Mantle reveals how narratives of heroism and villainism reify violence within the collective memory, moving from legend toward a more empirical, human experience. For de Vanny, historic imagery is filtered through a personal sphere of memory where conflict, myth, and recollection intersect. Through his layered surfaces the architecture of hero, villain, and bystander begins to collapse; valiant figures that once carried the weight of triumph appear vulnerable, mortal, and closer to our own humanness.
