Euro Neu Mode
Stéphane Abitbol, Jean-Baptiste Janisset, Paul Ferens & Charles Benjamin and Villard & Brossard
@
Everyday Gallery
Jos Smolderenstraat 18
2000 Antwerp, Belgium
The lockdown meant a complete closing of all art galleries and institutes — true. The art world has found beautiful ways to deal with it — also true.
At Everyday Gallery, Boris Devis’ Antwerp based gallery in the Nieuw Zuid, the constraints of COVID’s lockdown have generated a series of new digital artworks by the gallery’s artists.
Learning about the restrictions on visiting art spaces, the gallery thought ahead. Giving the artists a wild card to imagine their ideal setting to present their works, these environments were digitally rendered as fictive exhibitions. That way a utopian presentation of their sculptures and paintings could be made, and shared online, in times of social distancing.
Wild at heart (as the gallery loves its artist), their imagined settings bring the viewer from a storage to a far off Egyptian cave. Using the artist’s mind’s eye and the tools of animation maker Orson Oxo Van Beek, their dreams were solidified and made shareable online.
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Charles Benjamin & Paul Ferens
This show Euro Neu Mode is meant to be an extension of what we did with a space we ran called New Day Gallery, where we often exhibited people who were not primarily artists. Sometimes we made exhibitions completely without artists, only displaying Gallery Merchandise or import/export carton boxes. For Euro Neu Mode we thought it would be great to extend this to display found paintings (which are in a sense also deprived of an artist) besides our own paintings. Martin Kippenberger once said there have to be bad paintings in a show, otherwise, it won’t be possible to tell which ones are the good ones. This show is very much in this spirit.
The way we approached the creation of our rendered video was to see this opportunity as an extension of the gallery’s physical space where the uncanny laws of time and space were whatever we would wish them to be. A wall of consumed, created, and lost goods coursing on an infinite chain of cardboard boxes.
Sound by Charles Benjamin @workingfromhome1234 Animation design by Orson Oxo Van Beek @orsonoxovanbeek
Jean-Baptiste Janisset
I like the idea of bringing together the stigmas of various cultures - archaic and modern - in syncretic communion; to live in a globalized post-industrial world and to transfigure in a setting worthy of a cenotaph or an arch. For me, it’s about embodying spirit forms. I’m looking to cross intentions with inter-world communication networks. With the help of new technology, we imagined a scenography of my works in the Khazneh of Petra, whose name comes from Arabic and literally means «Pharaoh’s treasure».
Sound by Jean-Baptiste Janisset @jeanbaptistejanisset in collaboration with Tim Karbon @timkarbon
Animation design by Orson Oxo Van Beek @orsonoxovanbeek
Villard & Brossard
Can we see the fine moulds of Dyson parts as a contemporary ornamental delicacy? Is industrial pastry coating sexy? What do our objects, furniture, and accessories invite us to? To an amusing arrangement? To an obscene embrace? How do art, design, and its production threaten? The sculptures of Villard & Brossard witness a re-appropriation of shapes, in all shapes, with contradictions of their imagined associates, without ma- king any distinction in their provenance, hierarchy, or chronology.
We could see the sculpture as a love declaration to all shapes ever produced by human activity. From the industrial component to domestic accessories; from urban waste to traditional elements for the layout of a space. Hearing it as an attempt to embrace everything; literally taking it in your arms.
Here the organic and erotic character of the decorative sets from the mid- 18th century— from which Art Nouveau borrows at the end of the 19th century— is the most brutal and toxic.
The legacy of Art Nouveau has passed through the filter of contemporary sensibility— anxiety included. New art that is ruder, served by other references, other materials, and components that are recuperated, modulated, moulded, and then multiplied and assembled; frankly facing the decorative character of art, is possibly a good strategy.
Animation design by Orson Oxo Van Beek @orsonoxovanbeek
Stéphane Abitbol
To enter a painting? I mean literally, to enter into a world it hides, it shelters, into it’s universe, inside it’s own structure, to try and to meet it’s substance, to go in the heart of it’s structure. Is that possible?
The idea with the virtual video, was to risk other interpretations, to try differently, to suggest an other way to see and to understand my paintings. By altering some details, by arranging some things... Letting glimpses of the foundations of a house almost in ruins, and in which paintings are hanged onto burned bricks, the ground is covered with red sand, the virtual exhibition finally presented itself like a way to produce a few scenographic fantasies hidden at the bottom of my thoughts.
This space, this idea, is supposed to bring you within a story, to take you into a narration that I try for the first time. I’d like to think that by entering this burned house which appears on the first painting, is like entering a bit into my practice. Failing to be able to see closer or even to touch them, you can still enter into that story, where are inscribed my paintings, my figures, my motions, my preoccupations...
The ideas set forth in my paintings preserve a strong relationship to the themes of nature, family and comfort but also with a motion, a process. Here with the video I’m risking to invert the so-called role of a habitat and I attempt by a series of paintings to interpret a lack or a mere formal souvenir. Recalling the importance of the almost familiar link between Man and Nature. My paintings are like a space, they are multiple layers which, together, are forming limits. Sometimes they overlay, they infect, or even follow each other. My paintings are not really souvenirs but more like something that is far away and that doesn’t explain itself. Sometimes without knowing how, those figures, those gestures come and take place into our memory and create sense where we didn’t expected to.
Like many other painters, I arrange, alter details and risk myself to interpretations to produce sense. That to inscribe those gestures, those figures into the canvas, it means to try to keep a trace of it, before it goes back to the chaos of my reality.
Animation design by Orson Oxo Van Beek @orsonoxovanbeek
To view the complete works list of Euro Neu Mode, visit here.