A group of Persons

A project realized as an editor and curator, in collaboration with Eleonora Sovrani. With the support of Raphaël Pirenne, Anaël Lejeune, Sébastien Biset, Aurélie Bouvart, Olivier Mignon.

With artistic contributions by Jan Baetens, Claude Cattelain, William Cliff, Lara Gasparotto, Pierre Gerard, Louise Herlemont, Guy-Marc Hinant, Jean De Lacoste, Pierre Lauwers, Messieurs Delmotte, Christophe Terlinden, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Thierry Van Hasselt, Raphaël Van Lerberghe and Thierry Zéno. 

This book is the result of the work done in Venice during the artistic residency established by the association (SIC) on the occasion of the 55th Venice Biennial, for the Wallonia/Brussels Federation, present outside of the Belgian pavillion in 2013, in the Off Program. It gathers individual sequences, containing specific and identified creations made by the fifteen artists invited, of different ages and practices, in their own names, and collective sequences, where contributions are mixed together, while remaining anonymous. The collective, anonymous chapters, are based on the experience of the website of the project, which was open during the four months of the residency to all the contributors, displaying works on the site, from June to September 2013, without having their names mentionned at the time. The resulting book proposed to dive into the particular atmosphere of Venice, its maze, its past and present, its scene and wings, its epic and dead moments. 

An exhibition realised as curator, in duo with Raphaël Pirenne.

With works by Marcel Duchamp, Henri Laurens, Bernard Gaube, Duane Michals, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Jean Hélion, Lili Dujourie, Orla Barry, Gerhard Richter, Otto Steinert, Eugène Atget, Eugène Carrière, Christine Felten & Véronique Massinger, Léon Vranken, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Eadweard Muybridge, Claude Cattelain, Constantin Brancusi, Gert Robijns, Philippe De Gobert, Natalia Gontcharova, Suchan Kinoshita, Barbara Morgan, Gillian Wearing, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hélène Amouzou, Roni Horn, Chantal Maes, Ulla von Brandenburg, Hans Bellmer. 

This exhibition, which title is derived from a remark adressed by Edgar Degas to one of his peers, Eugène Carrière, will gather about thirty artists, both modern and contemporary, around two issues intimately related: the question of the relation between the artist and his model and his inner motivation to create an image of him/her. This second question being essentialy of a photographic nature: the wish to transpose a volume onto a surface, into a material, and the illusion of such endless quest.

Starting with works from the second half of the 19th century up to very recent creations, the exhibition will be divided into different chapters, each dedicated to the different aspects of the thematic.

In the first room, there will be a transversal overview of the historical relation between the « painter and his Muse », with what it suggests in terms of desire, of aspiration to imbue the works of art with feelings of admiration, fascination, sensuality... Works by Marcel Duchamp, Lilie Dujourie, Bernard Gaube, Jean Hélion, Henri Matisse will be shown in this section.

A second room will be dedicated to the relationship between photography and painting, around this thematic of the movement. Works by Gerhard Richter, Eugène Carrière, Otto Steinert and others come here into consideration. 

In a third room, the particular space of the studio will be investigated, as the place by excellence where the model is posing, but also as a place for experimentation and game with forms, with volumes in the perspective of a composition. Here, works by Constantin Brancusi, Peter Fischli et David Weiss, Claud Cattelain, Leon Vranken will be shown. 

This principle of the combination of forms and objects through movements or gestures, will be extended in the fourth room, that wil consider the connections existing between the visual arts and the dance, the performance-based arts, through works realised by Barbara Morgan, Gabriel Orozco, Gillian Wearing, Natalia Gontcharova, Suchan Kinoshita...

In the last room, the iconic and fetishist aspects of the model will be observed, notably under the lights of disciplines such as psychoanalysis, and iconology, and through works made by Paul Cézanne, Hans Bellmer, Roni Horn or Ulla Von Brandenburg among others.