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 The site-specific historical references in Céline Mathieu mineworker’s breakfast.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
Willy De Sauter (b.1938, Belgium, lives and works in Tielt) works in sculpture, drawing and painting to explore line, form and colour. His artistic practice, in constant relation to architecture, is an invitation to observe closely. He reduces painting to its essence applying paint monochromatically to a flat surface. His wooden panels, laid on the floor, whose unique colours are the result of an intuitive mixtures of chalk and pigment, function as a negative mirror of the world, creating two ethereal rectangles. His works on paper, partially covered with pastel colour, are interspersed between the rough concrete columns of Fondation CAB’s space. A clear line connects the two fields of colour, dividing the page in two. The paper is attached to the wall only at the top, allowing it to curl gently outwards, creating a tension between these different surfaces. De Sauter continues this series by using partially lacquered and sanded brass and copper plates to investigate their reflective properties. Through his aesthetic research, he balances formal simplicity and theoretical depth. His minimalist approach allows matter, light, silence and colour to continually interact and reveal themselves.
Through her work, Greet Billet (b.1973, Leuven, Belgium, lives and works in Brussels) focusses in the representation of light and with it on our perception of space and colour. Her mirror work, displayed in the courtyard, questions our perception and multiplies our points of view. It is hard to see the mirror rather than the ever-changing reflection of light in it. RGB is composed of large, heavy sheets of untreated red, green and blue Plexiglas, overlaid on each other, which bend and distort the onlooker’s reflection. Billet analyzes the correlation between the objective and measurable digital reality of monochromes and their subjective perception and appreciation. Her works reflect on the impossibility of an objective approach to the processes of sensory perception. The only reality that can be considered objective is the one of pure aesthetic experience.
Katinka Bock (b.1976, Germany, lives and works in Paris) makes sculptures, performances and installations that most often stem from in-situ investigation. By examining the physical and material conditions of a given place, she explores its historical, social and political charge. The materials she uses are chosen for their physical properties, and include clay, sand, stone, chalk, wood, metal, water and air. Her installation Palermo, inspired by a deconstructed balcony in the city of Palermo, was created in 2016 and is shown here in a new context of Fondation CAB. This work, made of bluestone and metal, is quintessential of Katinka Bock’s practice, which is based on concrete references, in her relationship to materials, gestures, forms, space and time, while at the same time opening up towards something less graspable and related to the notions of absence and immateriality.
The work of the Dutch artist Manon de Boer (b.1966, Kodaikanal, India, lives and works in Brussels) oscillates between distance and intimacy. Her videos evoke the experience of time and what we do with it. The Untroubled Mind, 2016, looks into boredom and leisure. In this silent film, she captured, over the course of three years, her son’s unexpected interventions as she encountered them around her house. Objects tied, stacked, repurposed, webbed together, spread out, often somewhat hidden, were captured by an amateur 16mm Bolex camera that defines 20-second shots, which is the longest duration that can be filmed by winding the camera up manually. A film of sculptures, traces of time passed playing.
The work of Céline Mathieu (Belgium 1989, lives and works in Berlin and Brussels) is both sensory and conceptual. It is often influenced by the site and conditions in which she is invited to exhibit. The textual components of the exhibition play an active role in the experience of her work. In this site- specific installation she looks at the history of the Fondation CAB building, once a coal warehouse and then a dance rehearsal space before becoming the exhibition space it is today. A miner’s breakfast consisted of a raw egg cracked into a beer, accompanied by a glass of whisky. The fake food was made by exchanging the sculpting skills of other artists for Céline’s writing skills. Footage found of a ballet exam shows ballerinas personally pressing into poses, before delivering a synchronised performance. A hand-painted plexiglass sign reads a found quote, on fruit that cannot be eaten. The storage door of the exhibition space is left open, as (a sculptural) part of the installation.
Guy Mees (b.1935, Malines – d. 2003, Antwerp) is a leading figure in the Belgian avant-garde. His oeuvre combines elements of painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper and performance. His art, with its effective and experimental visual language, emphasizes the importance of colour, texture and spatial experience. Between 1960 and 1967, Mees produced a body of works made with industrially manufactured lace and neon lights, in various flat and three-dimensional compositions, entitled Lost Space. In 1983, he reused the title Lost Space, in his site-specific variations made of coloured tissue paper, metal sheets or strips of fragile paper pinned directly to the wall, a new Lost Space. Some of these deconstructed pictorial spaces resemble two- dimensional painting, while other snippets seem to float freely on the wall. To complete the ensemble, four polished aluminium elements lean against a wall in a symmetrical, repetitive pattern.
Johanna von Monkiewitsch (b.1979, Italy, lives and works in Cologne) delves into the fundamental nature of light itself. Streaming into the space, she uses various media, adddressing light’s nature as a means to create images. Her work is infused by lightness in every sense of the word: weightless foam, beams of light and sensitivity. In her work Orosei I, 2022, the beam is interrupted as it is captured by a block of foam before reaching the wall. At the entrance, Blue/7, 2023, neon lights illuminate the viewer’s face, are aligned against a blue background, suggesting a patch of sky or a skylight in the wall. While linking the different spheres of the space to visitors, Monkiewitsch not only encourages a reflection on the nature of medias, but also undertakes a meticulous examination of the perpetual gap between imagery and reality.
