Greet Billet, Katinka Bock, Manon de Boer, Willy De Sauter, Céline Mathieu, Guy Mees, Johanna von Monkiewitsch
The group exhibition ‘These circumstances’ at Fondation CAB brings together works by artists Katinka Bock (b. 1976, Germany, lives and works in Paris), Greet Billet (b.1973, Belgium, lives and works in Brussels), Manon de Boer (b.1966, India, lives and works in Brussels), Willy De Sauter (b.1938, Belgium, lives and works in Bruges), Céline Mathieu (b.1989, Belgium, lives and works between Berlin and Brussels), Guy Mees (b.1935, d.2003, Belgium), and Johanna von Monkiewitsch (b.1979, Italy, lives and works in Cologne).
Fondation CAB about the exhibition:
“What we’re interested in through the balanced and subtle works of the seven artists on show is stimulating our perception and highlighting another reality, the edge of space or what is hidden within it. To achieve this, we draw on key themes such as simultaneous absence and presence, unlimited pictorial space, construction, deconstruction, light, play, memory and time. This exhibition features several generations of artists in dialogue, exploring the relationship between image and reality, and the impact of light and aesthetic experience on our visual perception. The works exhibited highlight the link between the viewer, the work of art and the surrounding space.”
They invite one to look closer; to notice the fluidified image of the space as you walk around mirroring surfaces of Greet Billet. To notice a blue patch of paint that appears as a hole or skylight in the wall in Johanna von Monkiewitsch’s neon wall piece. Or to see the negative space being an equal part of the image for Guy Mees. Willy De Sauter’s shifts of colour in chalked surfaces. Manon de Boer’s son’s playful interventions at home, autonomous sculptures made into film. The site-specific historical references in Céline Mathieu mineworker’s breakfast. Or you may notice Katinka Bock’s Belgian blue stone leaning against the wall, that with the series of steel elements that make the architecture of the space a constitutive part of the work.
In line with Fondation CAB’s program, minimal marries conceptual, far beyond geometry, order and harmony. Metal, electricity, chemicals, but equally so the nuance of colour in a painting, or the way an arrangement of snippets is hung — have a way of being active. An ode to both sincerity and sobriety, the exhibiting artists’ practices relate to the site they show in. Many physical, social, and (art) historical observations seem to inform the works, it’s like they absorb their surroundings, their circumstances. And each in their own way drink light, and sublimate simplicity. Nothing in our lives exists that is not filtered by the fictions that inform and produce us.[1]
Maybe this exhibition text could merely be a poem:
Purple daily precious
Recipe-less rather
improvised
Ripe figs warming to the palm of a hand
The way they
cup, body-like
It’s snippets suspended
mid-air
It’s hollows and projections
Things that sound like tycoon
Elegant gestures held
plexi steel blue stone
A video of light
beam made projection now
The blue field later
appears a hole in the wall
Text by Céline Mathieu
[1] The Contemporary Condition, I Cannot Sleep, Lionel Ruffel
