ELISA  PLATTEAU  GALERIE
Lakensestraat 86
Rue de Laeken
B-Brussel 1000 Bruxelles

Anne Daems
François Curlet
Neal Beggs
Kenneth Andrew Mroczek

Like a picnic at the lake on the finest of days, LET’S PICK THE CHERRIES FIRST brings delectable flavours together in an idyllic setting to engender a most refreshing summer show. To further illuminate this occasion the invitation card has been fashioned as an artwork, designed by Kenneth Andrew Mroczek and affectionately printed in pink and red.

ANNE DAEMS

With feint lines and pastel colours, Anne Daems’s drawings (1995-2009) are delicate but not weak, quiet but not silent. Being subtitled with a fragment of text or simply bare and inferential they actually speak from a place that is not literal, a place somewhere between the heart and the soul. At first it is merely their nonchalant nature that piques the curiosity, arousing a sense of wonder; in fact their very gentleness is the aspect that beckons, luring the viewer closer and ever inwards. Their beauty is fragile and readily accessible. The essential and naïve character of the drawn image is at once welcoming and extraordinary. Inhabiting half the upper level of the gallery, these framed and unframed works are sensitively arranged yet cheerily retain the sensation of happenstance, forming casual or awkward relationships with one another while modestly claiming their honest individuality. This near-nothingness between things that only attain potency when visually absorbed and (sub-)consciously appreciated is also captured in Daems’s films and photographs. In this way the video My Father’s Garden (2008), a film in eight parts (shown here in a module of two) softly expounds the daily living pleasures of Daems’s own father, revealing the appealingly slow motion of real life actions while capturing the details, both visual and aural, of a precious existence in which the normal activity taking place in one man’s garden over time reveals his entire ethos.

FRANÇOIS CURLET

Like the artist himself, François Curlet’s works exude contrariness and wit. Fiction and reality are cleverly intertwined to create a new kind of real, and in so doing they reformulate the really real, the legitimate model. For Curlet, inserting the imaginary into material and tangible propositions functions “like a kind of bait and a ‘virus by conviction’ in strict reality, a kind of ‘blind test’ for imaginary propositions, which confront parts of the real in the same organism.” Entirely aware of the ricochet that takes place in the reception of the resulting object once the object is made and seen, François Curlet is very much abreast of the cynicism of survival. “The real can listen to itself, either in differed situations or with headphones.” In his re-jigged or transposed or discombobulated objects, Curlet is in no doubt that the real’s constituents remain perceptible and, as such, interfere with the responses that it provokes. The attentive viewer will have cause to smirk; the cheekiness inherent in the message is ready for the taking. Exhibited here are two of Curlet’s earlier masterpieces: Charlie’s Flag (2005), a knitted banner boasting the motif of (the Peanuts comic strip character who Curlet holds dear:) Charlie Brown’s jumper, and Surf Canadian (2001), a pseudo-surfboard in timber, a fossil of the surf culture formed in a climate of Canadian woodcutters.

NEAL BEGGS

In his incessant interweaving of life and art and with his stalwart inclination to invest material with power, all of Neal Beggs’s works, however diverse, are instilled with potency. Beggs is bent on relating the anthropological to the spiritual, tapping into the coding between nature and culture. Displayed here is a sign comprising of lights formed into letters spelling-out I POSSESS FLAMES (2009). Extracted in a purely abstract manner from a larger work of the same ilk that directly imparts the scripture from I Corinthians 13:1-3 entitled LONESOME IN THE DESERT (2009), the words in this piece, contrarily, do not comprise of a quote, thus the piece is immediately embedded with manifold meaning. In itself the expression has no precedent; rather, the first two words were positioned above the third word in the former work; it was only afterwards that this trio leapt from the panel and formed an entity in the artist’s mind, proceeding to stick like glue and very soon making perfect sense… Beggs thinks back to John Lennon, as to St. Paul, both of who were said to possess flames in the way of fire and energy. One can also, of course, reference the Pentecost, whence a tongue of fire came and settled on each person, allowing them to be guided by the Spirit and to speak in many languages. In fact, after replaying in the mind long enough, ‘I possess flames’, this newly compiled expression becomes akin to one of Lawrence Weiner’s statements or to the chorus in a pop song. When constructing the piece, Beggs set about composing it as if it were a landscape painting, choosing blue lights as ‘sky’ and red lights as ‘desert’, the cold and the warm. Indeed this subliminally created visually luminous one-liner reeks of rich interpretation of every sort and at every level.

KENNETH ANDREW MROCZEK

Kenneth Andrew Mroczek closely heeds the day-to-day, the basis of our conditional reality. Energy, alchemy, nature, geography and landscape, as well as society, architecture, healing and love, are themes variously applied in his work. His innovative repertoire comprises the full range of media; he often deploys methods that are other in order to evade pedagogical status, therein finding a means to “placate reality”. Facts, figures and labels, in combination with suggestions, are favourite vehicles for this. Exploring the unique dynamics of circumstance as related to locality is a foremost feature of his artistic practice. In pride of place on the central podium at the upper level of the gallery is the charming The Moon Will Find You (2008), a white and pastel-blue table with a surface shaped like a geometric flower and engraved with a white leafy floral motif; its short, tapered, irregularly positioned wooden legs pierce through the tabletop and together with a length of yarn containing assorted timber baubles, serve to support the horizontal surface, further emphasising its Arts and Crafts spirit. In perfect harmony, a glazed white vase mimicking the texture of the surface is positioned atop the table and intertwined in the composition. Juxtaposed on the ledge of the stair is Directional (2008), an angular object not unlike a graphical bird, with boomerang overtones. Perched on the floor above which the drawings of Anne Daems hover is Free Trade Isn’t Free (2008), a slender, petite, and happily wonky totem pole, a wise and wonderful element that acts like a quirky beacon within this sea of exotic creations.