LAB[AU] | LE SOIR: PRESS

In Le Soir Jean-Marie Wynants writes about artist collective LAb[au]'s exhibitions at le Botanique and at the gallery.

Entering the Musée du Botanique space, one has the impression of discovering the lair of a mad, obsessive scientist. On the walls, hundreds of frames (2,987 in all) of the same dimensions, those of a single blank page. This same blank page is the origin of each of the series carefully aligned here. For each series, a rule is laid down, indicating how to fill this blank page until it becomes completely black. In all, 120 different rules have been adopted, giving rise to as many series.

This idea, as eccentric as it is audacious, was born of the practice of the members of the LAb[au] collective (for Laboratoire d'art et d'urbanisme). Formed in 1997 by Manuel Abendroth and Jérôme Decock, now joined by Thibault Drouillon, the group blends genres and techniques to explore the link between art and language. "Basically, we had an aborted art school career," explains Manuel Abendroth, "then we turned to other disciplines such as design and architecture. What brought us together are fundamental questions about art, but to tackle them, we use the tools most common in other disciplines such as architecture, namely the computer."

In the center of the space, 160 variations on the exhibition title Possibles Probables can be seen, based on the rules imposed on an artificial intelligence. At the same time, at Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, LAb[au] proposes a work that plays on the mixing of colors to create new names for them.
A play on language with infinite possibilities that, as the collective explains, shows "only a tiny and very large fragment of the possible and probable".

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