Jens Hesse @ Canvascollectie Collection RBTF

This Friday Bozar will already unveil the 2012 edition of Canvascollectie Collection RTBF, one of the most comprehensive and somewhat uneven displays of emerging talent in Belgium. Ponyhof Gallery’s Nicolas van Kerckhove and Karen Vermeren are some of the participants of previous editions, so we are quite curious to see what the national jury singled out this year in seven selection phases all over this flat country. We are, however, familiar with one contribution already: the Pope of Ponyhof painter Jens Hesse.

Ce vendredi déjà, le Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles (le Bozar) dévoilera la sélection finale de l’édition 2012 de la Canvascollectie Collection RTBF, l’une des manifestations les plus larges, certes inégales, ouvertes aux talents dit émergents en Belgique. Deux peintres representés par la Ponyhof Gallery – Nicolas Van Kerckhove et Karen Vermeren – ont été distingués lors des éditions précédentes, nous sommes donc très curieuses de voir ce que le jury national a sélectionné cette année dans les sept phases de pre-sélection dans différents lieux. Nous sommes déjà bien familières avec le travail d’un des sélectionnés: Jens Hesse, un peintre Ponyhof, qui expose son pape.

Jens Hesse, Pope, 2010, 130×80, oil on corduroy / huile sur velours côtelé

Jens Hesse´s Pope, inspired by Francis Bacon´s version of Diego Velasquez ‘Portrait of Innocent X’. 

Le pape de Jens Hesse, inspirée par l’interprêtation de Francis Bacon du ‘Portrait d’Innocent X’ par Diego Velasquez.

Jens first popped up on our radar in 2010 at an exhibition at Musée d’Ixelles featuring fifteen of his paintings.  I remember enjoying his renderings of digital distorted satellite signals (two versions of the Pope belong to this series) as they exemplified the impact of contemporary photography, film and video on painting today, all while pointing at painting’s enduring ‘added value’: namely its ability to convey further sensations such as touch, temperature, movement and depth.

Nous avons découvert Jens lors d’une exposition au Musée d’Ixelles, où il exposait une quinzaine de ses tableaux. Je me souviens avoir aimé ses rendus des signaux de satelite deformées (les deux papes appartiennent à cette série), démontrant l’impact de la photographie, le cinéma et la vidéo sur la peinture contemporaine, tout en soulevant la plus-value de celle-ci:  notamment, sa capacité à transmettre des sensations supplémentaires comme le toucher, la température, le mouvement et la profondeur.

Jens Hesse, Bathers, 2010, 195×110, oil on corduroy / huile sur velours côtelé

By taking unwanted alterations introduced by imaging equipment as the topic of his work, Jens highlights the failures of modern technology but also the fake life seen on tv. It is a world of alleged perfections breaking up.

En prenant pour sujet des altérations indésirables accidentellement créées par la télévision numérique, Jens souligne les échecs de la technologie moderne mais aussi la fausseté des images propagandées par la télévisions. Il met en avant un monde soit-disant parfait en train de rompre.

At that time, I did not know that Jens was trained as a fashion designer and worked with an apparel manufacture for several years, which explains his feeling for texture and experiments with fabric effects.

À ce moment-là, je ne savais pas que Jens était styliste de formation et qu’il avait travaillé pendant plusieures années dans la conception des vêtements, ce qui explique sa sensibilité pour la texture et sa recherché sur les effets des différents tissus utilisés en tant que toiles dans ses peintures.

Jens Hesse, Beach, 2010, 120×68, oil on corduroy / huile sur velours côtelé

What happens when we spend more time looking at low-resolution images rather than looking at the world itself?

Qu’est-ce qui change quand nous percevons le monde à travers des images de basse résolution ?

A couple of months later, Jens joined Ponyhof Gallery and I had the chance to see more of his works during our different exhibitions as well as at his home. For My Private Disaster, which took place last autumn, Jens presented work inspired by the interlace effect (a video tool reducing the amount of data transfer by transmitting only half an image, the other half being substituted by dark lines and used to speed up the transfer time).

Jens a rejoint Ponyhof Gallery quelques mois plus tard, ce qui m’a permis de voir et mieux appréhender ses autres peintres lors de nos différentes expositions ainsi qu’à son atelier. Pour ‘My Private Disaster’, qui a eu lieu l’automne derniere, Jens a présenté des oeuvres inspirées par l’effet d’entrelacement (un outil de vidéo qui consiste à accélérer le temps de transfert en transmettant seulement la moitié d’une image, l’autre étant substituée par des lignes sombres).

Jens Hesse, Paradise Beach, 2011, 175×100, oil on corduroy / huile sur velours côtelé

Echoing the blurs of Gerhard Richter, Jens´ technique provides this painting of Thailand´s 2004 tsunami with a feeling of vibration and movement. 

Rappelant les flous de Gerhard Richter, la technique de Jens fournit à cette peinture du tsunami thaïlandais un sentiment de vibration et de mouvement.

On a concluding note, I have to say that one must see Jens´ paintings live in order to properly enjoy their skill and beauty. The JPEGs featured in this blog post are mere appetisers. So head to Bozar or contact us at Ponyhof Gallery for more information.

> Canvascollectie Collection RBTF is on from Friday 11 May to Sunday 10 June.
> See more of Jens´work at our website.

Pour conclure, je conseille voir les peintures de Jens en vrai afin de vraiment apprécier à la fois la technique employé par Jens ainsi que leur beauté. Les fichiers JPEG présentés dans ce billet ne sont que des teasers pour stimuler votre curiosité. Rendez vous donc au Bozar ou contactez nous à la Ponyhof Gallery pour plus d’information.

> La Canvascollectie Collection RBTF sera exposée du 11 mai au 10 juin.
> Voir d’autres oeuvres de Jens sur notre site web.

— Aleksandra Eriksson —

Image is everything: introducing Aurélien Dupuis

What changed when photography, with its inherent possibility of straightforward recording, cheap reproductions and easy distribution, demoted painting as the popular medium of representation?

This question was brought up already years ago by Gerhard Richter, who made his first photo painting in 1962 after a picture of Brigitte Bardot. Tired of capital lettered art, composition, colour, invention, design etc., “painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic and inartistic thing that anyone could do”, the delightfully lugubrious German explains in The Daily Practice of Painting (p. 22). The above-mentioned question was later re-stated by Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans and many an emerging painter (read Liv Vaisberg’s series on some different outcomes). But I wonder what John Berger would say about the ‘newest’ world, as seen on screen in facebook updates, tumblr feeds, pins, tweets and prolific blogging? Today, any kid can make a visually appealing picture of the most banal event with the help of a concealing vintage filter on his smartphone (FOAM Magazine had an interesting facebook post on this topic recently). Allegedly, a picture is worth more than a thousand words but some photography has developed to convey nothing at all, making it perfect for equally vacant advertising. As visual communication rapidly gains presence and power, the assessment of its influence is even more topical for painters and photographers alike who reflect on contemporary creation and use of images.

Aurélien Dupuis - Madonne no. 1, 28x35 cm, markers on paper

Aurélien Dupuis takes his inspiration from familiar and over-abundant motifs, such as school and workplace portraits (the series ‘48 portraits’, ‘Employé(e)/Medewerker’), real-estate development catalogues (‘Pavillons’), amateur photographs found on flea markets (‘X’), the Internet or social platforms (‘Enfant + chien’, ‘Madonne’, ‘Dormeurs’). He re-creates these widespread images – hackneyed captures of modern life – using ‘slow media’ such as charcoal and children’s markers, preserving the low definition, pixelisation and overexposure of hasted snapshots.

It is precisely the choice of technique that makes his work compelling despite the uneventful topics, by introducing complexity and pathos. At a first glance, the colourful children’s markers connote a feeling of babyhood nostalgia, but paradoxically, there is also something absurd of a trained painter playing with toys when he could make art, using proper materials. Also his choice of subject is ambiguous. On the one hand, these are pictures of people and situations of no particular charm or consequence. On the other, the painter must think that they are worthy of consideration as he spends so much time and effort re-creating them.

Aurélien Dupuis, Zone Pv_R 11, charcoal on paper, 100x70 cm

Further uncertainty is brought by the fact that Aurélien works in series and with repetitions, which both simulate and challenge the mechanic use of images in media and on the Internet, given the considerable labour that went into the re-creation of the given images.

Moreover, when watching his series, I am often pulled into one picture in particular. When meeting with Aurélien some weeks ago, I asked if the picture of my attraction was better known than the others — it was not, but he guessed that maybe my own memories were projected into the ‘eye-catching’ picture.

Aurélien Dupuis, 'Enfant+chien n°11', markers on paper, 138x120cm

Aurélien does, however, sometimes work from famous pictures: the posers of ‘Enfant + Chien’, for instance, are all anonymous but one, which was made after Andrei Tarkovsky’s polaroid of his family. By showing how certains ‘kodak moments’ repeat themselves, how certain actions become engrained into our culture and habits, the series is put into perspective.

The quality of Aurélien’s work lies precisely in its openness for contradictory interpretations (quite interestingly, in the art world, «confusing» is often close to «compelling», whereas words such as «decorative», «aesthetic» and «commercial» can be used as strong criticism).

On an ending note, I can reveal that in the framework of POPPOSITIONS, Aurélien Dupuis has prepared a series inspired by Belgian administrative clerks for whom the Bruxelles Congrès station was created. If you are in town during the Art Brussels week, come and see the result as well as the works of other emerging artists.

POPPOSITIONS off fair is on at Bruxelles Congrès from 20-22 April, 12-9 PM, with a Friday opening party and performances by invited guests from 9 PM until late. The full programme is updated at the website. 

— Aleksandra Eriksson Pogorzelska —

Painted images and photography: Painting after Richter and Morley…. (II)

There is another thought I would like to share today with you, following the reading the enlightening article of Barry Schwabsky on Painting at the Age of the Image: how contemporary painting has built up on the heritage of photography, but also went further than simply reproducing a category of images, as Gerhard Richter or Malcom Morley did at their time.

Malcolm Morley (2004) Tackle

According to Barry Schwabsky, artists such as Gerhard Richter and Malcom Morley pursued in essence similar goals as pop artists by choosing the image-realm over some other reality. Whether it is photographs, chosen by those two or comics chosen by Roy Lichtenstein, billboards by James Rosenquist or news snapshots by Andy Warhol, all are clearly limited categories of image material. This very choice was a polemic one, which painters today are no longer busy with.

The difference with contemporary painters, such as Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans to quote only but some of the most influential ones, is that they work in complete detachment from the photographic experience, they do not feel the need like Richter or Morley to represent the seamless “look” of the photograph. The major difference is that the painting remains painterly.

Marlene Dumas (2003) The Kiss

What is engrossing with today’s painting is that painters, although they paint with an aggregate of images, do no longer paint with neutrality but with engagement far from a certain aesthetic distance. They add their emotional stance by freely reinterpreting the photographic image. Situated between the the homogeneity of photography and the heterogeneity of collage, which often are the basis of their work, young painters treat the world they paint as a wholly image.

Céline Felga (2011) Untitled (Drawing and Collage)

 

“An art that eats its own head – Painting in the Age of the Image” by Barry Schwabsky

Painted images and photography (Part I)

In La carte et le territoire (Prix Goncourt 2010), Michel Houellebec portrays a fictive artist Jed Martin who made a painting of him – he staged himself as one of the main characters of the novel. In the book, Houellebec says that out of all the numerous photographs taken of himself, only one portraits will remain over the years and decades and it will be the one painted by Jed Martin. That same portrait which eventually – fictively – will cost him his life. But I’ll stop here in case you still want to read that book. So again the same question comes up, what is it that makes people nowadays engage with painting as a medium when there are so many exciting other media out there such as photography or video? I read recently interesting articles that clarified my thoughts on the articulation between painting and photography and video making. Again, I must repeat it is not about ranking one medium above another but to question the choice of contemporary artists for such medium in comparison to others.

 Upon the invention of photography, few gave much about painting being able to capture with so much precision and accuracy the subject-matter. Photography was seen as having a causal effect from the reality to the image and benefitted from “indexical quality”.

Painting was thus seen as threatened by photography which “withdrew from it the task of representation” and which thereby fully allowed the development of abstract painting  (this is however of course contested in art history – things are never so simple – if you consider for example the Impressionists who already made a substantial move away from pure representation). Malevitch, Rothko, Mondrian, to quote only but a few of the grand abstractionists, have shown that painting could have quite some other function than being a form of representation. “No, as Yves-Alain Blois jokes in his well-known essay Painting as Model, there is no solar eclipse in Malevitch’s Black Square or New York subway map in Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie…” (Barry Schwabsky).

Mondrian (1942) Broadway Boogie Woogie

But to come back to the relationship of painting with photography, after a generation showing a limited realm of chosen images, such as Gerhard Richter accurately reproducing the seamlessness of the photographic image, painters started to capitalised over the insufficiency of photography.

Gerhard Richter (1988) Betty, Oil on canvas, 101.9 x 59.4 cm

With the overabundance of photography and moving images in this world, photography and video have quickly shown their limits and lost their value. “Not being remembered at all: this has, in the end, been the fate the subjects of most photographs” argues Geoffrey Batchen, photography historian, for whom ‘straight’ photograph has always been an insufficient vehicle for memory.

Contemporary painters use paintings’ almost unlimited abilities to add “material sensuality, tactility and atmospheric possibilities” (Alison M. Gingeras). If in the old times, painters were trained to reconstruct pictorially what they saw with their eyes, whereas contemporary painters “work a reality that is already image” (Barry Schwabsky).

Jan de Lauré (2011) James

The imprecision of the painting brush actually corresponds to inaccuracy of the brain’s mnemonic functions. If a photograph is rather very faithful to what one sees, painting plays a better role in triggering free play of association and reminiscences through its subjectivity and its lack of  “pictorial authority and truth-telling capacity (which pertains to) photography”.

Greet van Autgaerden (2009), Kamp 5, Oil on Canvas, 180 x 200 cm (Ponyhof Gallery)

In a world over-saturated with “camera-made images, hyperrealistic forms such as photography and film have become banal and ineffective. Painting has regained a privileged status”, argues Alison M. Gingeras. “The medium’s tactility, uniqueness, mythology and inherent ambiguities has allowed painting to become an open-ended vehicle for both artist and viewer to evoke personal recollections, to embody collective experience and reflect upon its own history in the age of mechanical reproduction.”

Go to  Jan de Lauré on Ponyhof Gallery

Go to Greet van Autgaerden on Ponyhof Gallery

“An art that eats its own head – Painting in the Age of the Image” by Barry Schwabsky

 

“The Mnemonic Function of the Painted Image” by Alison M. Gingeras

“Painting as Model” by Yves-Alain Blois

Sfumato in contemporary painting?

Most of you who had some sort of art history education must have heard of sfumato. Think Leonardo da Vinci and his revolutionary painting technique consisting of obscuring lines or borders to create soft and mellow transitions between shades and colours; basically using high contrast and diffused light. It was his way of rendering the “mystery of life”. Now my question is: what about sfumato in contemporary painting? Is it enough to just make a blurry painting à la Gerhard Richter to create sfumato effects?

Sfumato comes from the Italian ‘sfumare’ which means  “to tone down” or “to evaporate like smoke”.  Take a look at the background landscape of the world’s most famous painting and you’ll see this subtle transition light to dark areas which evokes a hazy feeling whilst adding a gloria of enigma to facial features as if they were seen through a veil.

Leonordo da Vinci - Mona Lisa

It is not the role of this blog to give expert lectures on art history techniques, but in a nutshell, sfumato could be summarised to the “no brush” technique.  By using X-rays, scientists discovered how da Vinci perfected his technique by using 40 layers of ultra-thin layers of glaze and paint. They suspect he used his fingers as absolutely not a single brushstroke can be identified. The way da Vinci managed this near-perfection has long been a mystery for art historians.

Gerhard Richter - Landscape near Hubbelrath (1969)

Gerhard Richter is known for his “out-of-focus” trademark. Whether for representations of landscapes, still-life or portraits but also for his abstract pieces, Richter gives a blurred and hazy appearance to his paintings. No one before applied such a systematic blurry  approach to his work as Richter does. None of the Turners, Monets or Renoirs, who created a flowing unity among colours, went as far as managing this “perfect” blur (although unlike da Vinci he uses dry brushes to “feather” wet paint or in somes cases scrapes into the drying portrait with a ruler or spatula).

Gerhard Richter - Selfportrait

When I first encountered the work of Sophie Pigeron, I had the reflex to say ‘Ah Gerhard Richter’, by the sight of all those blurry paintings. But by giving it a closer look, I realised that Sophie draws the “blur” concept much further as she focuses on details of the “hazy” landscapes to the point of flirting with abstract painting. She wipes out details and points of focus completely so that the painter’s hand vanishes. Sophie deliberately called her series Sfumato and lay claim to the Renaissance technique. Yet, through her use of saturated colours such as fluorescent pink, her paintings are also reminiscent of graffiti street art and contemporary culture.

As we have set forth already, there is a certain return of the pathos and the emotions in today’s contemporary art and Sophie Pigeron’s work typically encourage the viewer to contemplate and remain puzzled by her work, which similarly to da Vinci, attempt to render the “mystery of life”.  As colours blend with light, it is for the beholder to fill in the detail with the help of his sensibility, personal memories and imagination.

Just as I decided to write on Sfumato and ‘blurry’ painting, I heard that there is currently a exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle called “Out of Focus. After Gerhard Richter“, which runs until 22 May 2011. The exhibition description refers to “the tradition of European painting since the fifteenth century, like for example in the sfumato-technique of Leonardo da Vinci.” The exhibition offers a closer, coherent look at this stylistic principle by presenting the paintings and photographic works by 21 artists all born after-1960 together with 21 works of Gerhard Richter. It shows how the artists used different kinds of blurring in various combination as a part of their pictorial language.