YOUNG BELGIUM OPUS II: FICTION(S)
Preciously preserved by the interior darkness of the caves that house them, pre-historical paintings show just how essential it was for our ancestors to give account of their daily lives. Some describe the preparation before a hunt, while others depict the magical and religious rituals imbued with shamanism. One could say this type of art is closest to reality and experiences and persists in ancient Egypt, where frescoes were drawn in the order it is was meant to be read, in a comic strip fashion, like an open book to the glories of the past or present. We have to wait until the Greek mythology for the narratives to surpass the established order and the representation of the living, to distract us from gods or half-gods and other superheroes of that time, and for Art to shift towards fiction. The various religions had no choice than to continue on that same path and improving it to better assert their power until artists of the 20th century came to disrupt this process, offering alternative modes of representation by reinventing the concept of the imagination.
Over the last two decades, the world has accelerated further, and with the development of social networks, images continue to invade our lives more and more by the day. Far from the Mythologies listed by Barthes at the end of the 1950s, the frescoes of yesterday are now on our screens, and each of us is to emit his own reality or true fiction, since received as a legitimate form description of reality. But what is reality in front of this onslaught of virtual images that overwhelm us but also our way of apprehension always imbued with interests and emotions? Also, it is interesting to observe that today more than ever young artists are seizing the narrative to feed their work, whether through the testimony of a sometimes barely filtered reality, or through the loophole of a cleverly crafted fiction. In any case, it is likely the dialogue connecting our five young visual artists, ready to face the Belgian contemporary scene, strong in a constantly renewed writing, generously irrigated every day by the news of a world in perpetual change. This young Belgian scene that we have chosen to present to you here wants to be like many other artists of our contemporaries, the witness of an era that continues to evolve and move us, but it is also very clear that the artistes resist the temptation of voyeurism and dramatization that characterize nowadays media.
Curated by Jean-Marc Dimanche.
– Text extract from the exhibition catalog by Jean-Marc Dimanche (translated from French)
Basile Boon
Since his childhood in the Meuse valley, Basile Boon, born in 1986, invents an inner world made up of construction games, steep landscapes, legends of castles in ruins, which will mark his work as an artist. In contraction to a society that demands excellence and specialization, Basile Boon sees himself as an eclectic generalist. His work is an imperfect, and not without irony, mixture of brutal art, pop culture, symbolic and mythological, architectural and artistic references. A form of reversed archaeology, where Basile brings out of the earth a civilization buried in his mind.
Antoine Carbonne
Born in Paris in 1987. Lives and works between Paris and Brussels. After spending his childhood in Senegal and then in Scotland, Antoine Carbonne continued his studies in the suburbs of Paris. He then went to Hunter College in New York and Beaux-Arts in Paris where he graduated in 2011. During this period, he regularly visited Philippe Cognée’s studio and the printing and publishing studio by Werner Bouwens.
Elsa Guillaume
Born in Carpentras (FR) in 1989. Lives and works in Brussels. From drawing to sculpture, through installation and video, Elsa Guillaume develops plastic research devoted to representations of the maritime universe. A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2013 and a diver since 2011, her work brings together her passion for the sea, drawing and ceramics.
Jonas Moënne
Born in Haute-Savoie (FR) in 1992. Lives and works in Brussels. Artist, researcher, transformer of matter, Jonas Moënne has found with ceramics, but also glass and stone, a real field of experimentation, a fertile terrain for the creation of work as unusual as poetic.
Elise Peroi
Born in Nantes (FR) in 1990, Élise Peroi lives and works in Brussels. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, with a Master in Textile Design in 2015. Since the beginning of her practice, Elise Peroi, through her work of weaving and through emptiness, seeks to translate what transcends, the breath, the atmosphere. Inspired by the book ‘Vivre de paysage or L’impensé de la Raison’ by François Jullien, she wishes to transcribe an encompassing vision of the world, where everything around us “is no longer a matter of ‘seeing’ but of living”.
