EVA BERENDES
MICHAEL VAN DEN ABEELE

29 JAN - 03 APR 2010

SETTING SAIL

The military vessel on the invitation card for this exhibition – an image from Michael Van den Abeele’s private collection of naval imagery – is, or was, called Mauretania. Not an uncommon name in the shipbuilding industry, as one of the world’s largest passenger ships, built for the British Cunard Line in 1906, was once also called Mauretania – one of history’s many accidental ironies, as the Mauretanian port city of Nouadhibou is now home to one of the biggest ship cemeteries in the world, with more than three hundred shipwrecks rusting away in the bay, many of which have been converted into makeshift living quarters for the desperately poor. As for the pattern covering the ship on the invite, this was apparently done for safety reasons – incongruous though it may sound, black-and-white-painted patterns make for excellent camouflage, their strong contrast rendering accurate observation of the vessel virtually impossible. To the naive gaze of the art observer, however, these patterns appear festive, gaudy – unintentionally artful, as if quoting from the history of modern and modernist form: a happy instance of mixing metaphors by way of application.

Approximation and application: two words, notions, which I propose we keep in the back of our mind when appreciating the work of Eva Berendes (°1974), even though we may have to leave it at that for the time being. The Berlin-based German artist is part of a generation of younger practicioners who have self-confidently revived interest in various seemingly archaic traditions of ‘artisanal’ artistic production – without relapsing, however, in an uncritical romance of craft and the manual for its own sake. Berendes is known primarily for her sculptural works using textiles, cloth and thread: monumental, billowing curtains as well as freestanding, colourful screens that are, paradoxically, transparent – works that simultaneously remind us (or me, at least) of the poetically minimalist thread sculptures of Lygia Pape and Fred Sandback, as well as of the constructivist art of the early Soviet period, when a remarkable group of female artists hastened the integration of ‘applied’ textile arts into the rarefied, hierarchically rigid domain of so-called ‘fine’ arts. ‘Applied’ abstraction, in other words, or a moribund, canonical form brought to playful life – almost irreverently so in the new silk hangings which Berendes will be presenting at this, her first gallery exhibition in Belgium.
In 2008 and 2009, Berendes had solo shows in Berlin, Frankfurt, London, New York and Zürich, and her work was also shown in group exhibition such as All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, pt. 2: The Thing in Mechelen and Sculpture Drawing at Daimler Contemporary Berlin.

When considered in the present impromptu dialogue with Berendes’ work, the objects of Michael Van den Abeele at first seem to aspire to the reassuring aura of proper, ‘autonomous’ art: his drawings are drawings, his paintings are paintings – though both do express a shared interest in the dainty aesthetics of patterning – and his sculptures are sculptures. Not surprisingly, however, Van den Abeele’s work likewise takes great pleasure in sabotaging this very mirage, and for me his Ashtrays remain exemplary artworks in that regard: crude, totemic concrete structures that double as smoking appurtenances – here too, minimalist sculpture is given the decisive twist of ‘application’, though Van den Abeele’s conception of the notion is (again, unsurprisingly) a decidedly darker one, as an unmistakeable neo-noir sensibility permeates his work as a whole, and this may perhaps be associated with the artist’s high standing in Brussels’ particular cultural environment – a milieu at the crossroads of many a surrealist undercurrent. If Berendes’ exercises in ‘application’ may somehow approximate the ghost of the prop, then Van den Abeele’s scattered drawings and paintings appear as spectral fragments from a storyboard that no sane mind will ever be able to piece together, but we do get a lot of directions, geometries, patterns, schemes: everything is set, it seems, for something to happen or something to emerge – but this may turn to be as outlandish as a war ship setting out to join the carnival.
Recent solo exhibitions by Michael Van den Abeele include It’s Character-Forming at EAC Les Halles in Porrentruy, Switzerland and Bonus Malus at Netwerk Aalst. Lately, his work has also been on view in group shows in Germany, Hungary, Mexico and Turkey.

Dieter Roelstraete

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Exhibition view Eva Berendes & Michael Van den Abeele, 29.01 – 03.04.2010.