calendario eventi  :: 

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29/6/2012

Two exhibitions

De Pont Museum, Tilburg

30 June - 2 September 2012
René Korten
Diver's Eye

The exhibition in the project space is dedicated to recent paintings by René Korten (Horn, 1957). Korten made his debut with formal paintings during the early 1980s. From 2001 to 2007 the emphasis lay with collaboration and with installations and projects carried out at specific locations. For the past several years he has been concentrating entirely on painting again, producing works in which the image is determined by the sensory and associative strength of forms and colors, of materials and the application of paint.

A great deal goes on in Korten's paintings. In Fall from Grace (2011) the highly diluted acrylic has found its own way across the surface. Sometimes the pigment has accumulated; other times it is the stratification of color that strikes the eye. Two oval shapes in white and light beige offer resistance to the veil-like movement of green and purple. The more striking of these is a white, meandering outline which stands out like a foreign body against the transparent, spatial quality of the veils of color.

Korten seeks a juxtaposition of diverse, often antithetical visual elements. They defy each other, question and approach each other, but never appease each other. Action and reaction, immediacy and reflection continually alternate in his way of working. While allowing the fluid paint to 'go its own way' in one phase, he resumes control of it in the next and experiments extensively with the placement of graphic lines and wavy contours. The qualities of the material are also put to use in this play of dualities. Korten paints on MDF boards that he has prepared with a layer of gesso. Some boards are only partially covered with this chalky layer. On the unprepared areas, the paint is absorbed into the MDF; the subdued pastel hues become more matte and dark than when painted on areas prepared with gesso. Layer by layer, therefore, the painting writes its own history. At times this may reach back to a previous existence, as can be seen with the two panels Valid Invalid (2011) which previously, in a different form, were part of an installation. Two rows of painted-over stickers still attest to this.

In Korten's recent paintings, a meandering line consisting of a strand of circles keeps on surfacing as a visual element. This motif gives rise, in Valid Invalid, to associations with a torso as well as with a bull's head. Turquoise areas of color and the mysterious little white lines resist all-too-easy conclusions however. Although the paintings evoke all sorts of associations - just as the distinct association with landscape emerges in the work Sameness (2011) - the image eludes any conclusive interpretation.

The two facets that Korten wants to bring together in his paintings - the formal and the organic, the constructed and the spontaneous, form and color, the concrete and the associative - can be reduced to the polarity nature/culture. We often treat these as opposites, but can a sharp dividing line actually be drawn between the two? Isn't the point at which they meet and overlap more interesting? Korten is fascinated with that diffuse area. Not until the painting rises above itself and relates, in its ambiguity and complexity, to an equally intangible reality, has it truly earned its right to exist. It is a metamorphosis toward which Korten works, yet that magic moment can never be predicted. It happens.

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30 June - 28 October 2012
Philippe Vandenberg & Berlinde De Bruyckere

‘Innocence is precisely: never to avoid the worst.’
This final sentence of Lettre au nègre, written in 2003 by Belgian artist Philippe Vandenberg (1952-2009), has become the title of an exhibition where Berlinde De Bruyckere (1964) engages in a dialogue with the work of this artist for whom she has great respect. In a carefully considered presentation she shows a personal selection of Vandenberg’s paintings and drawings, in combination with her own watercolors and several sculptures that have not been exhibited in Europe before.

Berlinde De Bruyckere hardly needs to be introduced as an artist. At De Pont her impressive figures in wax, appearing in two large vitrines, are a permanent part of the collection on display. The paintings and drawings of her fellow countryman Philippe Vandenberg are less known in the Netherlands.
To Vandenberg art and life were one. This outlook determined both the strength and the dramatic quality of all his work. By the time Vandenberg finished art school in Ghent, in 1976, he was already considered a highly talented artist. In 1981 he received the Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge, and soon after this he would be among Belgium’s most successful painters. Vandenberg was an artist who sought the connection between mind and soul. In his paintings he expressed the human condition, often referring to his political, philosophical and literary concerns. Painting was his means of coming to terms with life – with his own complex personality, with the absurdity of the world around him and with the art world, by which he was both celebrated and dismissed.

Having made a virtuoso debut, he then renounced any display of skill. His work became, especially after 1996, increasingly austere. Vandenberg’s development is characterized by creative ruptures in which he alternated between painting figuratively and abstractly. From the mid 1990s onward, drawing began to assume increasing significance in his work. While his paintings are often searching and obdurate, thousands of his pencil drawings make up a continuum of associative, occasionally cartoonish images, in which fears and obsessions are warded off. There are also works in which language becomes image; sometimes he achieves this with a single word, other times with invoking statements. Time and again, Vandenberg questioned form and content, trying to fathom his own depths and to understand why painting was such an adventure to him. Taking risks and exposing oneself to them were the consequence of his perspective on life as an artist. In June 2009 this ended with his suicide.

Over the past year, Berlinde De Bruyckere has looked at the thousands of drawings in his studio. ‘I often discerned a part of myself in them; Philippe Vandenberg is a soulmate,’ she writes in the book in which she combines four related series of pencil drawings by Vandenberg with her own watercolors. That affinity is primarily expressed in the subject matter. Both artists deal with existential themes: with suffering, with physical and emotional pain, loneliness and vulnerability. They also share a fondness for the old masters and a familiarity with the religious visual tradition. Christian motifs such as the Cross, the Pietà and the crown of thorns take on new levels of meaning in their work.

Image: Berlinde De Bruyckere, Actaeon, 2011-2012' 2012 (detail)

Museum of contemporary art De Pont
Wilhelminapark 1, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Opening hours:
Tuesday through Sunday 11 am - 5 pm. Closed on Monday
Admission:
Adults € 8,00
Groups of at least 15 people € 5,00
Students, 65+ € 4,00
Free entrance under 18

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