Won’t you not see ?
with :
Agnès GEOFFRAY, Aukje KOKS, Daniel JACOBY, Claudia RADULESCU, Alberto SCODRO
An exhibition curated by Emmanuel Lambion for MAISON GREGOIRE
Bn PROJECTS & Maison Grégoire are very pleased to invite you to Won’t you not see ?, an exhibition especially conceived for the architectural framework offered by maison Grégoire.
The title could sound as the regular invitation to what we are all supposed to do when we visit an exhibition : to open one’s eyes when looking at something. But, instead, the double negation comes here as the seminal twist, that is as an invitation not to see, no to try and capture what the works seem to offer you in the first place.
In more than one way, the selected works, which all proceed from very different practices, speak of an obliterated visibility and legibility. Something in them escapes the visual and / or direct mental apprehension and comprehension.
Agnès Geoffray’s contribution to the exhibition is deliberately restricted to the original image we have used for the invitation. As such the photograph will not be present in the show.
The French Paris-based artist, whose multi-fold practice (videos, photographs, sculptural installations and texts) often revolves around an investigation of the thin frontier existing between fiction and reality, gladly instillates the doubt about what is to be seen in her pictures (whether they are, at times, appropriated and reworked images, or, in other instances, completely staged) and about how they are to be understood.
Amsterdam-based (PE/ ES) Daniel Jacoby’s works are often structured in layers, which obliterate the direct perception of the iconic / narrative "content" of his installations, presentations, or videos.
This is also the case namely in his Towel Sculptures, of which we present three versions here : As their straightforward name indicates, these sculptures are made up of colourful bath towels whose shapes have been usually moulded on objects from the exhibition context and are subsequently fixed. Translated elsewhere in the exhibition space, they operate as a suggestive, ghost-like presence, both fragile and resilient.
In the present case, a further notion of displacement is introduced by the fact that the objects that have been covered have no direct connection with the architecture of Maison Grégoire. Instead, they have been chosen at the curator’s place.
Jacoby’s video Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot shows a man looking
intently at the camera and, between long silences, pronouncing short and barely understandable phrases. What could be interpreted as the statement of a witness is actually the lip-reading interpretation in real-time of an 80’s romantic comedy, whose very subject stands in contrast with the rather tense and gloomy atmosphere of the video.
Brussels-Based Aukje Kok’s pictorial work is characterised by poetic compositions, where she organises casual and unexpected encounters between selected objects from everyday life, ranging from wallets to cut-out pockets, chains, shirt collars or sunglasses.
Her repertoire is peculiar as are the confrontations that she stages, floating in a somehow suspended undetermined mental space, open to many interpretations.
Often, these decontextualised motives appear in several replicated instances / series on the pictorial field, and are painted with a progressively more and more fluid, evanescent brush, which confers them with an enigmatic, dream-like, dematerialised character.
Koks also likes to associate her painterly gesture to three-dimensionality : At times, she plays with the very concept of trompe-l’oeil in installations combining paintings with three-dimensional objects while, in some other instances, she applies her painted compositions on sculptural supports or transforms a given tri-dimensional object to turn it into its mere graphic bi-dimensional outline.
The sculptural practice of the italian Alberto Scodro tackles and exploits in his spatial installations the points of tension, the memory or functionality of a given environment, architecture or landscape. At times, he likes to subvert the very essence of a given material (e.g. in his floating stones), or to resort to small interventions that totally alter the functionality of a given object (nap door handle).
In the present case, his Ciupinara functions as a more autonomous sculptural piece, although it offers a good reflexive counterpoint to the very architecture of Maison Grégoire, entirely conceived for the circulation of air and light.
As such, Ciupinara is a cast of an invisible and hidden architecture, at least to most of us, made by a hidden and blind architect : the galleries excavated underground by a mole. In this case, the invitation addressed to the viewer of the piece could also be directly addressed to its alleged creator.
Finally, Claudia Radulescu’s intervention comes as a counterpoint to the general idea of the show, with its seemingly voyeuristic invitation. The implicit voyeurism is nevertheless countered by the effectiveness of the device, the setting chosen for it and the actual content of the image.
So, now, let us not see all this by ourselves.
Opening on 20 March 2015, 6 30-9 p.m.
Exhibition open on Saturdays, 2-6 p.m. and by appointment
From 21/03/2015 until 02/05/2015 + 13, 20 & 27/6/ 2015
Maison Grégoire
292 Dieweg
B 1180 Bruxelles
www.maisongregoire.be
With the partnership of ART BRUSSELS