Écologies intimes

To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure.
We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities.
Virginia Woolf – The Waves (1931)

A plastic bottle, a bed sheet yellowed by time, a sheet of paper, a scrap of cardboard or wood, a torn piece of clothing – the materials that form the basis of the artistic practices of Tatiana Wolska (1977), Dorota Buczkowska (1971) and Sandra Lecoq (1972) belong to the everyday. The three artists strive to transform and sublimate the almost nothing, the invisible, or even undesirable materials. Their economy of means is put at the service of visual, poetic and political reflections where the landscape of the intimate is explored layer by layer, point by point, texture by texture. The intimate is visually conveyed through sensual and organic forms, embracing bodies, superimpositions, depths and textile materials imbued with anonymous stories, mysteries and secrets. Tatiana Wolska’s organic sculptures in recycled wood generate strange presences, organic bodies structured in superimposed layers. Sandra Lecoq’s soft pieces present bodies merging and intertwining with humour, melancholy and poetry, as well as a multicoloured penis carpet made of strips of clothing patiently woven together. Dorota Buczkowska’s sculptural paintings are intuitive and spontaneous assemblages of materials, colours and patterns. They can be understood as a diary – sibylline and polysemic – through which the artist makes visible the rhythms and states of her inner life.

The works appear as extensions of their bodies, of their respective histories. Since they are not frontal, there is no show or demonstration. There is no shouting, rather silent presences that are as reassuring as they are uncomfortable. They come from a traditionally invisible and silent territory: the women’s modes of existence. In this way, a deafening silence is added to the intimate. The three artists work from their daily lives. Their repeated gestures of repair, recycling, reassembling, linked to care and metamorphosis, are (in)directly derived from the invisibilised work of women and the silence that surrounds it. Tatiana Wolska, Dorota Buczkowska and Sandra Lecoq reproduce and transcend these gestures assigned to women in order to broaden their scope. Each in their own way, they invite us to engage with enigmatic bodies filled with their personal experiences, their resistance and their stories. We have to pay attention to the materials, colours, shapes, traces, clues and everything that is hidden in each of the works. Our relationship with the works is inevitably physical and sensitive. We must also be attentive to a proliferating force inherent in their practices, where the assemblage generates a constant mutation of materials, forms and, more globally, a mutation of the space of representation. The three artists combined this strength in an unprecedented way by creating a multiform text. Conscious of belonging to an ecosystem where everyone is interdependent, they created an Exquisite corpse (“cadavre exquis”) motivated by thoughts of symbiosis, proliferation, humility, sisterhood and an ecology of the intimate that they share and impart with infinite generosity.

– Julie Crenn

PRESS:

• Belgique ou Californie ?, Jade Pillaudin in Le Quotidien de l’Art, 04.23 (FR/EN)
• La poésie du presque rien chez Irène Laub, Jean-Marie Wynants in Le Soir / MAD, 22.03.23 (FR)

Opening Thursday 9.03, 5pm > 9pm
in the presence of the artists
Exhibition 10.03 – 6.05

Irène Laub Gallery
29 rue Van Eyck, 1050 Brussels

Read more about Tatiana Wolska, Sandra Lecoq and Dorota Buczkowska