October 09, 2019

The five paintings that make up this proposition fall naturally within the approach, which for quite some time has been underpinning my work. Some of the images partly animating these paintings / screens, were taken from existing films or filmed documents, others were filmed directly by me. My inspiration for the paintings were Charles Baudelaire’s five conferences in Brussels in 1864, a few years before his death, on the subject of Eugène Delacroix, Théophile Gauthier and certain aspects of Artificial Paradises. This starting point forms a leitmotiv enabling me to conceive of a direct, almost natural association to Marcel Broodthaers, to the relationship of these “visionaries” of modernity with literature and art, journalistic writing, critical discourse and, of course, with Brussels. Added to the outline of these two important personalities are references blending individual experiences and images from popular culture. Several sources such as TV interviews, excerpts from cartoons and images from a famous pop music festival at the same time support and disrupt a too obvious link to the original framework so as to sustain it with its differences. There is no stated ambition of an installation, of an indissoluble entity, but an exhibition of five paintings whose distinctive characteristics depend on the different technologies. Portrait, allegory or landscape, historical or thematic references are all being dealt with and reflect the traditional paradigm of painting. This methodology gives these works a specific temporality owing to the constant reviewing of the forms that expand across the surface of each piece and whose images can be infinitely varied. Each of these paintings plays its own part but also opens up a possible vision of the whole set, an interplay of connections in which the images and the forms can enter into a dialogue. Thus, from painting to painting, through successive repeats, a film of a painting-in-action comes alive, in five scenes, not unlike five conferences whose main focus would be : painting and painting alone.