Features

"There aren’t any reasons for painting. That’s what is special about it. It doesn’t need justification. It’s essential that it is not used for other purposes. All the things which will, as it were, take away from what is mysterious about it."
— Christopher Le Brun

Frightening and fantastic, it is this surrendering to the day’s end that lies at the heart of Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck’s work. His exhibition ‘Nocturnal Journeys’ at KMSKA in Antwerp has successfully turned its daytime interiors of old and modern Masters into a dream-induced playground. Where everything is likely to fade to nothing in the blink of an eye.

"I’m always looking for anything and everything. I’m just so interested in people. I’m very much a people watcher, people are fascinating. But yet I’m a bit reclusive and kind of quiet. I love my own company and I love making, but I’m absolutely fascinated with people. I think they’re great, you know?"

Question: how to represent a face? This question relates to art history, of course, but also to the history of what the West has called “mankind.” We know that the face is a sign of humanity. In classical painting, portraits were often reserved for religious, royal, or upper-class figures. A portrait is not just an artistic commission, but has also served to embody a certain idea of humanity in the Western philosophical tradition.

Inspired by the 24 glass vitrines that circle the historic rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce (once used to display merchandise destined for the trading floor), Cherri conceives each as a vignette for the 24 images that animate each second of cinema. Inside these tall cases, the artist animates his grafted sculptures (combinations of damaged artifacts and his own carefully hand-crafted completions) with handwritten lines revived from Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète (1930). The visitor’s circumambulation around the circular passage space completes the united works’ transformation into a sort of zoetrope.

Heinz Mack has never stopped being an artistic pioneer. The multifaceted artist has created works across a wide variety of mediums including light art, sculpture, kinetic art, drawing, painting, photography, and land art. Underlying every work across his oeuvre is a fascination with the possibilities of time, space, and perception.

"Today, this spirit of openness is threatened and in danger, and some people only recall the seductive aspect of my work, forgetting the raw, political dimension. I think this is a mistake and you have to stay with what is raw and true, which doesn’t mean you can’t make life more enjoyable through the beauty of art."

Cardenas' exhibition 'OLYMPIA' brings together a suite of artworks that questions the role of painting in the context of accelerated image culture. The artist draws from the mutable nature of mythology, though in a very loose way, instead, we see an unfolding set of narrative works where unreal characters engage and play with fire in their pictorial landscape.

Marie Laurencin's paintings, which essentially represent teenaged girls, women, and children, are indeed marked by a grace that was considered very feminine by critics of the period, something the painter did not deny. With pastel shades and delicate features, she proposed an idealized figure of femininity.

The Cave extends the principle of identifying and instrumentalizing the natural frequency of an architectural space to the Paleolithic painted caves of Dordogne, specifically Grotte de Font-de-Gaume. Unlike other spaces previously explored in the 'Resonance Project,' these caves are not man-made, even if their cave drawings bear the markings of the earliest human creative activity. Beer worked with each of the singers, teaching them to stimulate the space modes, to transform and to displace their voices without any electronic amplification. In this way, he plays the notes of the cave as though it were an instrument. The cave becomes an extension of the voice, the singer’s body becomes the resonating organ of the cave.

A vivisected bird of prey, a dead fly, a phallic grasshopper; last summer, Johan Creten exhibited one hundred and twenty pieces of his hybrid bestiary in a flamboyant exhibition in Orléans. The ardent dialogue between his work and the permanent collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts ended in September, but eleven monumental bronze pieces remain on display in the city streets until Summer 2025.