Life’s accidents are a continual source of inspiration for the Ghentborn artist, and this particular one turned out to be the start of a new way of thinking. It was the trigger for introducing colour into his art, which until then had mainly been in black and white.

The role played by accidents in his oeuvre is surprising because Van Snick, whose work is currently on show at Leuven’s Museum M, is an artist fascinated by mathematics (the number 10 in particular) and mathematical order. Graph paper, ellipses and numerical connections recur in his early work.

On one wall is a work that at first glance seems to be two musical staves made out of chains. In fact, each “stave” is made up of 10 horizontal chains, each one comprising 10 links. Opposite are 10 pieces of paper and A4 folders filled with graph paper showing the different possibilities of arranging the chain links.

“I’m playing with mathematics,” he says quite simply before leading me over to another work created out of 100 pinheads divided into groups of 10, each conjuring up a simple, yet beautiful, stellar constellation. His inspiration for this work was finding a small box of pinheads in a department store and realising how once it was opened up and its contents revealed, the unity of the simple object disappeared. “Banal reality can be a source of new ideas and creativity,” he says. The exhibition at M also includes a room created by the artist’s 10 Masters students. A deceptively simple idea, it illustrates perfectly the way in which numbers and colours combine to create something personal.

The starting point is Van Snick’s particular palette of colours, developed from his “earlier fascination with decimals and their infinite permutations”. Each digit from 0 to 9 corresponds to a colour: the primary colours red, yellow and blue, the three complementary colours green, orange and purple, the non-colours black and white, and finally silver and gold.

Each student chose one of the colours and used it to paint a space on the wall of about nine square metres. The result, created under Van Snick’s supervision, is a room filled with 10 monochrome paintings, each with different texture, shading and quality. As we go round, he points to each colour and refers to them by the artist’s first name: “This one is Elise, here is Peter, the blue one there is Kevin...the colours fit their characters perfectly,” he says.

As we leave the room, I ask Van Snick what his personal colour is. “Blue,” he says after only the slightest of hesitations. And at that moment we walk into the space filled with his most recent work, “Black and blue column”, five diptychs where the dominant colour is blue, combined with black and shades of grey.

For Van Snick, who is a lecturer at Sint-Lukas College in Brussels and has been working with the Catholic University of Leuven on an art research programme for the last five years, it is absolutely crucial that he continues to create. He wants to convey the practice of art as well as the theory. The message he gives his students is: “Don’t think too much. Do things. By doing, you can think.”

A number of Van Snick’s works were not created according to a predetermined plan but during the production process itself. This is evidenced by “Production State”, where the artist started out by experimenting with a gypsum panel and the effects he could create with the plaster: at times it resembled the surface of the moon, at others Islamic architecture in the desert as seen on aerial photographs.

Van Snick was pleased with the effects and so made several of these panels. A lack of space in his workshop, however, meant that he ended up propping them up one against the other in his living space. From the chance element of this random stacking, a pattern emerged – one that he kept in the final arrangement.

“I like rationality, but rationality has to be crossed over by irrationality to make it vivid,” Van Snick tells me as we look out of the museum’s floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of Jan Fabre’s bright green beetle on a nearby square. “These accidents can make the piece exciting or attractive. They’re related to reality because in reality you have these accidents.”

Philippe Van Snick
Until 29 August
Angus Fairhurst
Until 12 September

Museum M
L Vanderkelenstraat 28
Leuven 
www.mleuven.be

Angus Fairhurst • Retrospective of Young British Artist

There’s hardly an artistic medium that didn’t pass through the hands of Angus Fairhurst, and it’s all in this retrospective at Museum M this summer: collages, painting, animation, video, sculpture.

The show was originally put together for the Arnolfini contemporary arts centre in Bristol, England. “We were talking about doing something just before his death,” says Tom Trevor, director of the Arnolfini, in Leuven for the opening of the show. “So it made sense to do an exhibition about him”

Fairhurst, who took his own life in 2008 at the age of 41, was one of the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs) to emerge from the London art scene in the late 1980s.

When you look at many of Fairhurst’s works, be it the gorilla-themed sculptures, the bus shelter model or the large-scale photographs that look like publicity posters, what initially strikes you is a sense of fun. Look a little longer, though, and you see how the artist is manipulating the images – removing the features of a face in a magazine or obliterating the words of a newspaper. It all leaves you with a sense of the absurdity of life.

This co-existence tallies with how Trevor, who knew the artist from their days at London’s Goldsmiths College, describes Fairhurst as having been “a funny bloke”, as well as someone who had “a strand of melancholy” and was “slightly detached, enjoying the absurdity of situations.”

Several of Fairhurst’s best-known works are in the show, including “Billboard: everything but the outline blacked-in”, inspired by the Yves Saint Laurent Opium perfume advert featuring Sophie Dahl, and “Gallery Connections”, the recording of strange and at times heated telephone conversations between art galleries.