What is done today in painting in Belgium

Ghent. There is no other point in common in the 150 works presented in the exhibition “Painting After Painting” than having been painted in Belgium, most of them in the past three years, by 74 artists of various origins born in the 1980s and 1990s. There is no Belgian style or school here. Diversity is assumed. The choice was made by a quartet of curators who, for each and each of them, brought their proposals.

“It is the first time in twenty-five years that an exhibition of such magnitude on contemporary painting is shown in Belgium, Specifies Philippe Van Cauteren, artistic director of the Smak (Stedelijk Museum Voor current Kunst) and one of the four commissioners. This is not a final portrait. It is rather a sample of what is created in the workshops in Belgium at the moment. There are certainly dozens of other artists who deserved to be shown. »»

The choice was made to present the red wireless works, except the existence of discreet affinities. “But a painting hung in one room could have been in another. »» Very few texts too, apart from a discreet cartel and a short biography for some of the artists.

It will be noted that a large majority of these paintings are figurative and that most of them are painted on tight canvases on chassis without questioning of the medium. This may be one of the explanations for the chosen title. After putting back painting, her death announced, painting comes back in force, but it is different. Innovation draws from the artist’s inner world, more than in form or support, which does not prevent Victoria Palacios, for example, from painting on a Toast, or William Ludwig Lutgens to combine painting and video in a costume comedy. In a world saturated with photographic images, painting offers the imagination an elsewhere that each artist can model as he pleases, sometimes working on the power of evocation of the image and sometimes on painting as language, even on both. Sarah Smolders, she frees herself from the image by offering an installation to see as a minimalist quest for space.

Register in the continuous flow of art history

In a land of painters like Belgium, artists who practice painting today assume to register in complete freedom in the history of art as in a continuous flow. We note here and there influences, quotes, made with more or less perspective, to masters of the past. We can thus see in Jannis Marwitz the ghosts of Brueghel and his landscapes in his enigmatic compositions [voir ill.] Or the grammar of Magritte at Charline Tyberghein, while Mae Dessauvage passes medieval iconography to the Manga aesthetic filter. The spectator may have the impression here that the outside world, his violence or his political events, are kept outside the workshop. When they are mentioned, it is by their intrusion into the intimate sphere, as in the installation in situ From Luís Lázaro Matos which is inspired by the double life of a European deputy for the Hungarian far -right party Fidez at the time of the Covid pandemic. Or when Korean Che Go Eun refers to the commodification of the body of Asian women on the Internet.

The vitality of painting in Belgium was no longer to prove, or to justify, but needed this confrontation of looks between contemporaries.