Bn PROJECTS - Maison GREGOIRE

It all started with an invitation from neighbours, that of Isabelle Parisod and Leo Panier, wife and son of the late Claude Panier, to imagine a project during the coming 2024 edition of Art on Paper in the atelier of Claude, linking his work to that of other artists.
I knew Claude’s work a little, having invited him in a massive historical group show in 2003 @ Botanique while I was Head of Exhibitions there (2000-2004) : the show Abstractions was an attempt at retracing a subjective panorama of abstraction in Wallonie-Bruxelles from little known works of Joseph Lacasse (predating Kandinsky) up to the present. Claude was one of the living artists whom I had invited but besides that occasion, we did not collaborate on another project.
What I appreciated in his work was/is the obvious consistency in the treatment of certain themes declined in series, with expressive titles. His body of work is certainly an obsessive one, revolving about the dialectics of desire and body, as an open and layered battlefield, which he managed to translate into layered multimedia techniques, mainly on paper and canvas.

The first artist I imagined to confront with Claude’s work was Renato Settembre, an Italian Germany-trained artist & residing in Brussels for the past 5 years, whom I had recently met. Renato had invited me to cartacea cartaccia, duo show with Margot that they had organized @ Rockin’squat, a former maison de repos in temporary occupation, 62 avenue de la Couronne.
The show was brilliantly installed and left an enduring impression on me.

Sedimentation made me think of two other artists whose bodies of works, although very different, I would have liked to confront with that of Claude :
the Gentenaar Rémie Vanderhaeghen, whose work I had discovered as a jury for the Eeckman Prize for the 2023 edition of Art and Paper and the Antwerp-based Nele Tas, who had come to my attention through social media.

At that stage, in spite of my interest in and fondness for their very distinctive practices, I was not sure whether these heterogeneous affinities could work with Claude’s work and together as well.
As often the case when paradoxical and intuitive associations are coming to one’s mind, things in the end fit together. Upon discussing with each of the artists, multiple threads and echoes appeared between each of their respective practice and that of Claude.

Quite naturally, the question of desire, in all its different possible manifestations, emerged as a possible main conductive red line, eliciting questions about/around our object-s of desire, or about us as desiring subject-s, or around the decisive focussing of desire in the creative process itself.
A desire that, at turns, may be repressed or inhibited, hesitant and questioning itself, or sublimated and translated.
As a sort of indirect metaphor for this translated and involutive quest for the creative desire, it is also striking that each of the artists resort to a multilayered process, often directly through a superposition of textures and supports or via an intricate to-and-fro of techniques.
Besides the subject itself of the representation, with recurrent leitmotive or obsessions, specific attention is also paid to the importance of its background or framing, whether that be on a conceptual / metaphorical or physical material way.

One of the main subjects of Nele Tas pictorial practice is her own persona, body and figure, here presented in two distinctive series, in style, techniques and moods. The Dienbladportretten are generally frontal portraits painted in vivid colours, subsequently obliterated by wide and vigorous dark / black brush strokes, which subsequently serve as mere backgrounds for the depiction of an object of desire or crystallization.
Strong and darkened pinks form the monochrome palette of the sturdy bodily silhouettes, more or less defined, in her Les fragiles series of canvases. The paradoxal implicit fragility of these figures exposing themselves, is underlined by a treatment of the edges of the canvases / frames of the compositions, enhanced with an optimist rainbow palette of watercolours, litterally untouchable and very fragile.

Renato Settembre’s practice is metamorphic, building itself as an associative body of work made up of series of interconnected works which, from the one to the other, show translations and alterations of motives, techniques, scales.
What is originally born as a drawing can become a painting, before inspiring a subsequent print / lithograph, which in turn can generate a distinctive drawing or painting…
The series which we present here revolves about the sublimation of a given linguistic central motive, the word Fiancée, magnified and generated with letters that have a strong plastic valence, which infiltrates, if in altered or camouflaged fashion, most of the works on display.
Settembre freely generates his own evolutive alphabet as a painter.
Often derived from organic shapes evoking bodily elements (e.g. spermatozooi, ovocyts), his visual alphabet evolves and adapts until dissolving again into captcha-like organic forms.

All this said, at a second glance at Renato’s works, what is striking is that, besides the recurrence and / or consistency of shapes, forms and « signifiers », what ultimately preoccupies and informs his research is how to deal with the negative space left over. His “backgrounds”, made of dashes, lines or brushstrokes applied along the contour of the foreground elements (like under eye wrinkles ?), act both as an abstract appendix and counterforce to his figurative vocabulary. 

Remie Vanderhaegen’s work is that embraces the circulation of images, ideas and concepts, their re-appropriation in a way that is often liminally positioned between iconoclasm and idolatry, at the same time very precise in the aesthetic gestures choices that are made, and evasive and ambiguous in their semantic and symbolic valence.
It blossoms in the totally assumed claim for a certain indetermination, an indetermination of desire also, leading at times to the creation of seemingly blurred images, transitive associations and very open interpretations.
The creative process is often sedimented as in Claude Panier’s work, resorting to a variety of techniques and material filters, often through the additive superposition of supports and layers (epoxy, varnishes).
The ultimate factor that both triggers and wraps up the creative process is a reflection about the framing and context of the object subject, whichever the latter may be.
These elements are particularly obvious in the work that gave/lent its title to the exhibition :
Vis-à-vis / dos-à-dos, made up of precisely framed & superposed dias, it evokes, in a blurred graphic way, the typologies of carriages that were designated with the corresponding french vocables.
Of course, as such, this title evokes the dialectics of desire and affinities at work in the present show, at times in dialogue, at times just ignorant of one another.
For this show, Remie realized a series of sculptural installations adapting / reacting to the architectural space. They are made up of letterboxes swallowing in a ambiguous but sculpturally effective way some prints featuring the meticulously indesigned reproductions of distinctive watermarks from image data banks. These sculptures respond to Herms, a series of specifically framed and fixed photographs taken during a residency in South Africa.
In additiion, a series of captcha multilayered drawings, often referring (in their reading) to the very dissolution of forms and signifyers, incidentally form a contrasting counterpoint to Renato Settembre’s monumental compositions.

Exhibition open on 4, 5, 6 October
2—7 pm
Atelier Claude Panier
17 rue Cornet de Grez
B-1030 Bruxelles

In partnership with Art on Paper & Brussels Drawing Week