Artists

The art of Skender Hyseni seems the oldest in the world as it is tormented by the questions of time. The notches, the scratches are stigmas that testify the founding gesture of man on the raw and imperfect material. By the action of his hand, his fingers, his entire body, he breathes spirit into matter which streches and wraps around itself forming in its lair, places hidden from the light of where a fascinating mystery emanates. The sculptor willingly integrates his work into the space that involves both light and its opposite, when the shadow is as solid as the projected object. As he dialogues with the most modest of substances: earth,this humble texture is transfigured by the poetry of the artist into a minimalist sculptural form, both rustic but so refined at the same time that it becomes sumptuous. Lucid and determined is the look of Skender Hyseni when he asserts with conviction that "things are simpler that people think". 

The work of Christine Nicaise could make us think about the Japanese concept “Wabi/Sabi" where Art is based on respect for nature and the alteration of time. These characteristics are not unique to Asia. The artist was never inspired by any philosophies from the Far East but rather by the concept of  “Ataraxia”. This concept dates back to the beginning of our Western civilization and is attributed to the Greek philosopher Democritus. He advocates the tranquility of the soul and the mastery of it by the exact appropriation of the value of things. This moderation leads to the harmony of existence. If we look at Christine Nicaise paintings, we see bluish and chalky white vibrations appearing on her gray backgrounds that drown in a limitless volume. The artist dilutes the layers and rubs them until transparent. It blurs the color and gives the material a patina until mattness. This refined austerity leaves no brush marks. We are in the reign of the continuous, of the purified, of patience, in a kind of time given to time. On the surface of this fusion, the artist throws a white or black sign and suddenly, we see the extremes making an alliance. The background where all times seem contained merge with space. On the other hand, the line in all its sharpness, does not have the patience of the bottom, it is energy and occurs as a kind of promise of an advent. It is immediacy and carries within it the finitude of the ephemeral. The sign that Christine Nicaise throws on her canvas remains illegible to our eyes. It does not designate, does not state, does not confine. It is the absolute sign, which enjoys existence before any structuring, before any grammar. Christine Nicaise's painting comes from somewhere, where things take place but, without telling us what, writes Jean Marie Klinkenberg of the Royal Academy of Belgium. We have no access except contemplation, the raw act of looking. All the primordial elements are invited in his art of painting: water, air, earth and fire. They participate in a certain penumbra, in the sober palette of silent nature.

Igor Tishin is one of the most important representatives of Belarusian painting and perfectly illustrates this specificity. His work consists of a major quest for this Belarusian identity.

The artist explores with the help of metaphors, the collective consciousness of his people, where the spirit of Chagall as well as the naive folklore of the 19th century persist in wanting to color life, although the dark Soviet dogmas still hover. TISHIN's gaze is offbeat, he constantly swings between reality and imagination, between identity and otherness. His disturbing brush strokes lead to an insolent work, animated by derision but it must be said that the trick is to know how to read between the lines. Many colors around the painted heads and the scenes are often associated with words from Western literature.

Thus, Igor TISHIN comments, provokes and recklessly breaks his own stylistic forms, he fights like a wolf in order to preserve his dreams and the original cultural consciousness of his people.

Eric Kengen's work is an album of life where gestures forge links of all kinds : filial, tender, sensual and metaphorical. Now in the fullness of his powers, he stimulates our imagination and regenerates the urgency of a free gaze.
 

Romina Remmo’s work is all about thread, filament and filiation. The textile element is the main theme of her creation, it symbolizes the time and the ravages of time. Photographer, painter, embroiderer, several times awarded, she also had a scholarship for the “Fondation de la Tapisserie” (Tournai). She spins strands of fate and feminity. Under cover of sewing, violence sneaks its way when it comes to unspeakable.

After spending his youth in the Congo, Vincent Strebelle studied sculpture and painting at the Fine Arts Academies in Liege and Brussels from 1964 to 1968. 

He was awarded the Government Medal and the Mastery Prize in 1968. He also received an honourable mention for "La Jeune Peinture Belge" prize in 1985. He has won a number of prizes in Belgium and abroad. A poet and explorer by nature, versatile yet consistent, he was set designer for the Wallonia-Brussels Pavilion in Lisbon in 1998, and for the Belgian Pavilion in Hanover in the year 2000.

He has created many monumental sculptures for public spaces and a range of city-based works in France and China. In 2013, he was involved in an artistic capacity in the construction of the Marche-en-Famenne prison.

Natalya Zaloznaya was born in Minsk in 1960 as the daughter of Belorussian artist Nikolai Zalozny. She graduated from the Belorussian State Academy of Art in Minsk in 1985. In 2005, her work was shown at the Venice Biennale. Natalya Zaloznaya’s art has been extensively exhibited in both Europe and U.S. Her works can be found in the State Tretyakov gallery in Moscow and also at the Belorussian National State Museum in Minsk.

For Leif Österman, refusing norms is a state of mind. The Swedish artist takes a lucid and disillusioned look at technological progress and the resulting alienation and so, he searches for a new equilibrium. His spontaneous painting feeds on an optimistic ecology that is deeply rooted in Scandinavian culture. His view of perspective disturbs and distorts our reference points of both scale and proportion. The approach of this artist also includes the association of material and color. The gesture of the brush remains fiery and the chromatic flights daring. His expressive drawing is violently intertwined with colour to the limit of the recognisable. Seen from the sea, the artist-sailor offers us a glimpse of the lyrical value of the Baltic coasts that never lost their wild enchantment.  

Ray Richardson was born in Woolwich, London in 1964. He studied at St Martins School of Art and Goldsmiths College. He has lived and worked in London, Brussels, Paris and Chicago. He currently lives and works in London

His paintings are more than just a mirror of everyday life. They are drawn from his own experience of being born, bred and from living and working in London but also his experiences beyond there. When you look at his work you don’t have to experience it through the usual suspects of art history and great artists. See it too through the minor musical language of a 1970's Marvin Gaye and Gil Scott Heron or the pulp history of James Ellroy (author of the book and the oscar wining film L.A. Confidential who incidentally owns three Richardson's) or the motivation of cinema and photography.

'Ray Richardson is the Martin Scorsese of painting' Lindsay Macrae GQ Magazine

'There is a filmic quality in these works which proposes Ray Richardson as a David Lynch of canvas and paint' Iain Gale, The Independent Newspaper

After his studies at the Institut Saint-Luc Tournai, at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest and at the Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, Guillaume Ninove set up his studio in Brussels.

He centres his work mainly on architectural structure. His subject evokes both a nostalgic return to the city of his birth and an individual eye for the shapes and the wanderings of contemporary architecture. Executed with a near-surgical precision, placed on wooden boxes, the architectural constructions are arranged in such a way as to accentuate to the maximum the isolation of the structure. Guillaume Ninove uses the recovered materials and waste of our consumer society. He recycles and transmutes this waste from the ordinary into architectural structures as fictional as they are real.

Adam Dix’s work plays on the association between technology and our desperate desire to communicate at all costs. He expresses this association through the use of ritualistic imagery taken from religion, nationalism and science fiction.

These belief systems, which link the past and the present, make it possible to define science fiction as a kind of contemporary folklore, an afterglow of ritualized worship. The mobile phone and the satellite become totems, aggregating the flow of communication between the whole of humanity.

Dix’s painting takes as its starting point, a period of historical optimism; the future as imagined by our predecessors. By linking contemporary technology to its origins in the 1950s, Adam invites us to question the concept of "social networking" within a community.  

Ariane de Rosmorduc has an extreme sensitivity for color as well as for texture. She ardently works the bottom of her paintings. She scratches and scrapes each of the layers so that the overlays act between them, thus encouraging the material to release its light. The mastered and optimized background is the ideal environment to receive all aspects of life. She's  since a long time interested  in associations with the marine world or microbiology. These archaic forms of humanity, vibrant and bright, move to the rhythm of their pseudopods. 

After celebrating the mysteries and the phantasmgoria of the underwater world,  nowedays she comes back closer to the earth with the tumbleweeds. Tumbleweeds are typical plants from the desert of the American west. They're bushy light balls of vegetation which, once dried, detach from their roots and roll with the wind. Western films and visual media have led to a symbolic meaning of this mysterious plant which moves and turns on itself in all lightness, in desolate emptied places. Ariane does not lose the thread, when it comes to interpreting this phenomenon in a contemporary metaphor on the fate of part of humanity. This plant migration is sublimed by the artist in a very rich chromatic nuances and by a breath-taking work of the material. These matter/colour vibrations play in the space to the point of infusing it the movement thus causing the forward flight of what we call the "twirling"

As initially Karlo Binsztok was a film director and former student at the Brussels “La Cambre” school, in his painting we see the taste for the image and the unexpected staging. The filmmaker’s eye is always visible in the uniqueness of perspectives. He adores backlighting and uses an endless stream of browns and greys, satiation for the man who claims to be able to paint in a room with the blinds closed, with light beginning in blackness and flickering in the shadows. Suspicious of excess, his profound ability to evoke human experience is to be found in fingerprints and traces.

Scarlett Platel was born in England in 1987 and trained at Brighton University College of Art. Both she and her work are entirely of their time and place; Western Europe at the beginning of the 21st century. 

Using photographic and dark room techniques, Platel assembles concepts and images as they emerge from the complex legacy of psychoanalytical and spiritual thought. She reconstructs these potent symbols and primitive shapes, blending them with dyadic archetypes and vivid colours, creating her own phantasmagoria of existence. 

With their glowing, dreamlike quality, Platel’s work seems to inhabit a subconscious expanse, where mundane objects are illuminated with a subtle prescience, sometimes sinister, at other times sublime.

At 27, Platel has committed herself to her creative and spiritual journey. The lens is fresh and clear, the mind sharp and bright and the soul deep and restless.

No one engaged in the making of images can dispense with the question of their relationship to ideas. Artists, no less than anyone, live in a world of notions: we absorb informations and process them into ideals which orient our actions.

Images cannot be just diversions from reflexion, but are part of our world view. How can we control what our images mean?

My work is founded on a conviction tha the image is a secondary manifestation of representation, of which the textual form is the reality. The image is just an illusory subjective effect.

The artist should consider his inner world in as much as it presents a really available configuration of shared cultural values.

work various media – painting,photography and video, all with a strong digital import.

The paintings bring together lines and colors, and also figurative motifs with an elusive content, where synesthaetic colour play a major role.

Photographs also are assemblages of lines and colours, but in the causal chains that produce them, an external scene, acting as a physical trace, imposes its specific presence, and all photograph has a documentary reality. But the passive captation of the decisive instant is not a dogma : the image recomposes the many facets of a duration of up to an hour or two.

There is more a decisive moment than a decisive instant.

His collage work is made from a wide range of images from old books, magazines, old postcards from early 20th Century to the sixties and communist propaganda posters, which he cuts out by using sharp blades. These numerous tiny elements are then glued and finally encapsulated in epoxy resin. In his drive for fragmentation close to the fragmentation of himself, an idea arises and David Crunelle must make it happen urgently. He enters then in a new constellation from which emerge vibrantly, psychedelic and hypnotic meaningfull scenes. “Intarsia “is the name of his last collages series. He devotes himself with considerable skill to new obsessive superpositions of all kinds of stories integrating elements and traces of his past personal experience. These multi-layered complex collages close to American quilt sparkle like a spectacular illusion no longer knowing what is surface and what is depth.

Philippe Decelle is well know in the world of Belgium contemporary art. At sixteen he creates his first work and was recognized at the age of twenty with the award of The Young Belgium Painting Prize. Although the geometric abstraction influence was always his background, his line was already precise, his work clear. Quickly, Philippe Decelle expressed a personal vision of his environment, always mindfull for the perfect expression of line, choice of colors and harmony of form. The artist's civil engineering study reinforces the tendency for geometrical repetion.His work reflects an ordely world with axioms of symmetry, matrix, fractals... and even in some works , he provides an answer to the dilemma between order and informality.In all his work the artist strives and feels deeply for the equilibrium, in order to provide link to the work of mathematicians of past civilizations. (Text. J. Rousseaux)

Bertrand Burgalat once wrote: “What characterises Jean Pierre Müller – written without the hyphen – is precisely his quest for a sign of unity. Throughout his œuvre, in his unique rapport with music and visual arts, whether he is working with Aimé Mpane at Tervuren's AfricaMuseum or teaching at La Cambre, lies a determination to literally bring forms and beings together. This desire runs deep in his collaborations with Sean O'Hagan, Nile Rodgers, Archie Shepp, and the 7x7 Sound Paintings.” The approach of Brussels-native Jean Pierre Müller extends across several universes, including music, mythology, and urban culture. Essentially focusing on human activity, his colourful artworks are highly rhythmically charged whilst his aesthetic expresses itself through overcrowding, overspilling, and accumulation. Some critics liken his work to that of Belgian Fauvist artists like Edgard Tytgat and Rik Wouters. While his art is seldom autobiographical, it opens up to an infinitely intimate perspective, reflecting the struggle that lies deep within himself.

Charles Le Maire likes to work in a square format, where composition and colour are inseparable and interdependent. Diluting, mixing, superimposing, hollowing out or spreading out the pictorial material ; the act of painting is ultimately about making one gesture after another and thus revealing the properties of the material. Working on these fundamentals of the medium means finding an unlimited field of exploration, a space of non-mastery and discovering that the material brings to the work nuances and shapes impossible to imagine beforehand. Charles Le Maire favours a reduced vocabulary that produces clear compositions and highlights details. His relaxed style produces vibrant ripples at the edges of the contours, distancing the geometric forms from the regularity we expect of them.