ART BRUSSELS
23 - 26 APR 2010
booth 3A-07
Elisa Platteau Galerie is pleased to announce its participation at the 28th edition of the contemporary art fair
Art Brussels, with work featuring Danai Anesiadou, Eva Berendes, Thorsten Brinkmann, Jeffrey Clancy, Anne Daems, Michael Van den Abeele, Pieter Vermeersch, Peter Wächtler and Freek Wambacq.
Born in Germany, raised in Greece, moved to Belgium, trained as a costume designer, and now, finally, working as an artist in the expanded field of performance: it should come as no surprise that the mercurial biographical trajectory of DANAI ANESIADOU (b. 1973; lives and works in Brussels) has produced an artistic practice of matching convolution, confusion even. Tapping from a wide variety of sources in the adjoining realms of leftfield popular (‘low’) culture and the canonical forms of ‘high’ culture, the art of Anesiadou – and an ever-changing cast of collaborators and travelling companions, is perhaps best appreciated and enjoyed against the referential backdrop of avant-garde cinema and the envelope-pushing, genre-bending, mouldbreaking film art of such maverick auteurs as John Cassavetes, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Alain Resnais.
The German artist EVA BERENDES (b. 1974; lives and works in Berlin) is part of a generation of younger practitioners 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 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.
In his fantastical oeuvre, the German artist THORSTEN BRINKMANN (°1971; lives and works in Hamburg) moves between painting, photography, sculpture, readymade, collage and performance. Brinkmann is an active collector of found objects such as ruined wardrobes, lampshades, side tables, clothing and more. In the series
‘Portraits of a Serialsammler’ Brinkmann disguises himself in a different way each time. One time he puts
second-hand clothes over his head. Another time he hides his face in a lampshade or a flowerpot. Using the junk from his collection Brinkmann moulds his own body into a new representation of himself each time. With these photographed sculptures Brinkmann gives new meaning to the traditional understanding of painting and sculpture and refers to art history with pleasure. His oeuvre is to be considered as an adventurous search for the cohesion of genres, objects and eras.
Art object or Object art are terminologies whose arrangement lies in the discussion on the art-craft industry, or arts-and-crafts. The American artist JEFFREY CLANCY (b. 1976; lives and works in Portland, Maine), a Metalsmith by training and currently professor at the Maine College of Art, is loyal to his medium but not averse to the questions being presented in this debate. And in this debate – in which he is also the central figure and is thereby confronted – Clancy finds parallels with connotations, societal structures, standards and norms that became imposed through the course of history.
In his career Clancy, as reflected in an extensive CV, has built up a skill that can best be defined as ease and loyalty with respect to his material, his medium. His involvement in the debate, his knowledge and handcrafting skills, have thus put him in a position in which he is able to question his own medium. In so doing he creates objects that leave the observer in doubt, and he poses questions that allow the diverse pros and cons in the art-craft debate to be brought into circulation.
The Belgian artist ANNE DAEMS (b. 1966; lives and works in Brussels) permanent subject is the “almost
nothing”. In her photos, videos and drawings, Daems shows specific qualities of everyday life, inconspicuous actions and events which at first sight are insignificant. That what seems like a snapshot or a simple drawing is in fact much more sophisticated. She succeeds in accumulating details on a particular subject – usually a person – so as to reveal an entire microcosm. The spectacular nature of these works lies precisely in the non-spectacular aspect. Nothing is of importance and yet everything is meaningful and mysterious.
The American artist KENNETH ANDREW MROCZEK (b. 1981; lives and works in Brussels and Cascadia) 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.
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.
Belgian artist MICHAEL VAN DEN ABEELE (b. 1974, lives and works in Brussels) is as versatile as he is productive. His drawings, gouaches, oil paintings, sculptures and animation loops are full of absurdism and plastic inventiveness. In his most recent work characters appear with rambling names and motives, “the bright man,” “the spray tube of Eindhoven”, ”Smiley Smile”, “Legoman”, etc. Sometimes they are rickety and explosive, sometimes translucent and anti-human, but always endowed with indestructible phlegm of artificial bliss. One by one they have emerged from Circus Maximus, a small collection of 54 sketches. This collection is a manic succession of distorted constructivist compositions, pushed in overdrive by libidinous impulses. His work is the result of his reinvention of the frames and references that define our existence. Notions such as space, territories and imaginary geographies are at the core of this work.
The oeuvre of PIETER VERMEERSCH (Kortrijk, 1973) is mainly situated in the field of painting. As a painter in his artistic practice his work is not only confined to the use of canvas, he frequently uses other forms of media such as photography, installations and video. His research into the art of painting, in which representation and abstraction are used and explored as parameters, is often expressed by spacial interventions that utilize pictural concepts in an architectural context and often explore the boundaries of perception. Apart from these temporary interventions, however, the develop¬ment of the work in his atelier is an equally important aspect of his artistic practice in which emphasis is placed on paintings that search for the ambiguous relationship between images and meta images.
In German artist PETER WÄCHTLER’s (b. 1979; lives and works in Brussels and Berlin) video ‘Les Ailes des Anges’, the artist participates in a “Soirée Internationale” regularly held at a identically named Vietnamese restaurant in Brussels, and organized by one of the founders of the German Green Party. This kind of ‘speed networking’ is a model of professional engagement, invented by a post-social business world that presumes that people have little time to establish meaningful inter-personal relationships (thus, this system replaces meaningful, free-flowing interactions with vapid, ad-hoc public relations in which conversations must remain within the specified criteria, in this case environmental politics. In a way, this video shows two sides of contemporary micropolitics: a modal side and an aesthetic side. Today, micropolitical formations or “secret societies” form a very noticeable part of our everyday lives. They have become banal and conspicuous, or, less “secret”. Wächtler’s videos and works engage with these strange, ad-hoc groups whose purpose seems at once clear and peculiarly entrenched.
In his oeuvre the Belgian artist FREEK WAMBACQ (b.1978; lives and works in Brussels) shows a remarkable sensitivity for the changing status of everyday objects. With an apparently obvious ease he detects unsuspected forms of sculpturality in life as it (sometimes) is: a near endless joining together of objects that appear as merchandise, as trophy, as prototype, as specimen, as epitomy of taste – even if they were carelessly plopped down somewhere – while radiating something that might refer to an ideal of intrinsic beauty. It is often about situations from the twilight zone between banal and special: specific moments that Wambacq applies to explore the corridor between art and non-art, as a repositioning that is often as trivial as it is significant. That subtlety is not only visible in the care (and the technical baggage) with which he sets-out and presents works, but also in the unexpressed humour that emerges as the fixed ‘decorum of things’ receives a staggering blow.