"Book Of Brilliant Things"
Steven Baelen, Francisco Valdés, Jean-Luc Verna & Simon Willems
from March 18th to April 17th 2010
Quotation of popular imagery, reference, diversion, self quotation, cropping… Book Of Brilliant Things is a collection of images. Drawn or painted, they are fragile and preciously handled relics. At first glance, Steven Baelen, Francisco Valdès, Jean-Luc Verna and Simon Willems share a certain practice, where collection and repetition are driving forces.
But above all, it’s by overpassing the critical aspect of the accumulation that the four artists have found a common ground. Indeed, these gathered images, systematically reactivated, read anew, dug and detailed become the hotbed of a daily practice which draws a paradoxical movement : the repetition of patterns is a figure of postmodern critical point of view, while the repetition of gesture erases reflexive distance.
For fun, Steven Baelen said once : "Drawing is an utterly romantic practice ". His smile betrayed all the ambiguity of his position. Drawing and painting are laborious and meticulous processes that request to inhabit the images for a long time: the artist is holding the same tense dialogue with the density of the medium than with the density of the very images.
By deepening the same furrow on and on, the relationship becomes little by little an ambiguous mixture of suspicion and fascination. It is not possible to read Jean-Luc Verna's work as a mere erudite quotation of a tradition going from Félicien Rops to Gothic rock. But to see only the slow gathering of a pantheon of personal icons would be to reduce his practice to a naive fetishism.
The contemporary use of such iconographic practice can be read as an attempt to silence the constant flow of daily images. But with these four artists, the silence is not creating a mute absurdity. They organize so as to become mental spaces and places to wander in, as figuratively as literally: it is the case for Steven Baelen, who’s transforming his studio and apartment in an expanding jungle of charcoal where he ventures a bit more every day; it is the case of Simon Willems who, for years, have been wandering mentally in Kelhsteinhaus, Adolf Hitler's holiday house, since then reconverted as a restaurant. The place appears under all angles in his paintings, in the foreground, but fossilizes slowly to become a discreet, though pregnant, background. The images become as much haunted as they are are haunting. They acquire a presence beyond their visual expression.
The series of monitors of Francisco Valdès, who’s also a collector of ghosts' photographs, is of the same vein : they are the remains of some frenzy of images that became mute; only the weight of the support remains. As the rest of these “brilliant things”, they’re split between the morbidity of the accumulation and the vitality of a relentless creation.
The ambiguous gesture of these artists is not only a mise en abîme of their practice, it holds out a mirror to the gallerist and the collector, who, according to different modes, take, select, organize works and develop an intimate relationship with these images that behold them.
-Florent Delval
