Art Brussels 2020 [online edition]

Irène Laub Gallery is pleased to present a selection of works from the gallery’s artists. We chose to unveil them progressively, following three distinct themes, until fourteen artists are shown on the platform. Each Thursday (the 28th, the 4th and the 11th), new works and new artists will be revealed.

Our first selection brings together 5 international artists reflecting upon architecture and spatial construction. Artists play with perception, create theoretical and visual dialogues with architecture, or generate cocoon-like organic shapes. Works by José Pédro Croft, Fernanda Fragateiro, Panos Papadopoulos, Roeland Tweelinckx and Tatiana Wolska.

• José Pedro Croft develops a visual language based on the superposition and intersection of grids, lines and geometrical panes, playing with our perception of space and depth.
• Fernanda Fragateiro’s relationship to architecture is both formal and theorical. In several of her works, she uses critical treaties reflecting on modernism, architecture and urbanism as the physical base of her compositions.
• The most basic elements of spatial construction – corners and angles – have always been a leitmotiv in Panos Papadopoulos’ work. With just three lines and a few details added in a precise flick of the wrist, he conjures whole worlds.
• Roeland Tweelinckx uses objects and materials from our daily lives – or their duplicates – to create a dialogue with the artwork’s environment. He subverts our expectations and upsets traditional hierarchies between objects and architectural structures.
• Tatiana Wolska takes possession of space in a more informal way, creating makeshift shelters or translucent cocoons. Made from recycled waste materials, her constructions and sculptures are characterized by organic growth and proliferating shapes.

The 2nd series is characterised by interactions with history: artworks expressing temporal density, from personal memories to political archeology and including artistic conversations unfolding through time. Works by Lucile Bertrand, Rui Calçada Bastos, Gudny Rosa Ingimarsdottir, Eirene Efstathiou and Pedro A.H. Paixão.

• Lucile Bertrand explores political and human crises through the issues of territory and displacement: border crossing and its consequences, the travel experience and the fleeting inscription of wars and disasters on landscapes.
• In his new series,  Rui Calçada Bastos initiates a formal and spiritual dialogue with several figures of art history, through compositions made from painted envelopes. In each work, he includes one hidden letter to the artist he revisits.
• Gudny Rosa Ingimarsdottir’s artworks take the form of stratigraphic or topographic assemblages that constantly link past and present. Previously used and kept many years in her studio, In “untitled – humide”, the original layer has been kept many years in her studio bears witness to the manipulations, erasures and reparations that characterize her practice.
• Eirene Efstathiou works from visual and textual paper archives. She brings forth past events that some would be only too willing to forget, aiming to revive them in a new context and question their hidden narratives.
• In a recent series of works, dedicated to Central Africa in (neo)colonial times and the possibilities of reparation, Pedro A.H. Paixão broached the complex topic of restitution. He presents visual works where things are felt and though anew, not under the trial of history and morality but under their own light.

Finally, the 3rd selection will present appoaches that are going beyond painting. The artists explore different ways to extend or transcend painting; they shift its framework and interfere with the traditional divides between disciplines. Works by Gauthier Hubert, Athina Ioannou, Guillermo Mora and Bernard Villers.

• Gauthier Hubert uses an almost colorless palette to reflect on – or play with – ideas of identity and ethnicity. Disappearing colors evoke the loss of memory and information, as evidences of the remains of real-life events and historical stories.
• Athina Ioannou’s textile work explores themes such as rhythm, transparency, light and movement. The artist enhances the physical qualities of the material by soaking the fabrics in linseed oil, in this way she transforms her ready-made textiles into profound art.
• Guillermo Mora focuses on three concepts: overlapping, concealment and disappearance in painting. Hiding a series of drawings and sketches from the artist’s past that subtly mix between layers, his large paintings create a pictorial structure in which the two temporal realities coexist, as if the painting were a time capsule.
• Bernard Villers’ practice questions the traditional relationship between support and color. In “Mingeishi noir et jaune”, minimalist gesture of Bernard Villers – a single stroke, a line made irregular by the fluctuating pressure of the instrument and the coating of paint – turns the process into the artwork itself.