Exhibition at La maison rouge – The Red House in Paris
Michaël Borremans, The good ingredients
Recent paintings and drawings
La Maison Rouge - The Red House, Paris
June 8 - September 24, 2006
La maison rouge presents the first showing in France of the work of Michaël Borremans, a Belgian artist, born in 1963 and who lives and works in Ghent.
The viewer is instantly struck by the technical virtuosity of Michaël Borremans' works, both his canvas oil paintings and his pencil drawings, watercolours and gouaches, which he sometimes creates on pages taken from old books. References to the Flemish masters and, to an even greater extent, Manet immediately come to mind. However, the subject matter brings us closer to the present day, or at least to the mid-20th century, with references to illustration, 1940s cinema, and most of all Belgian Surrealism.
Indeed, there is something disquieting in Michaël Borremans' works. The narrative themes are often dreamrelated or drawn from the imagination, and the characters hold enigmatic poses as they perform difficult-todecipher tasks. Meticulous factory workers or small groups of middle-class figures appear just beyond the grasp of a reality that is only suggested by a detail.
Many of his drawings use elements of scale and mise en abîme. The figures seem to be living inside an architect's model or a theatre decor, observed by some external entity. Texts often accompany the drawings, transforming them into draft sketches or blueprints.
The artist's scathing sense of humour, the intriguingly strange titles and the technical mastery of the works themselves all give Michaël Borremans a singular status in the contemporary art world.
At la maison rouge, Michaël Borremans shows eight recent paintings in which the patterns of light and shadow, the earthy brown, grey and ochre tones and the subdued brushstrokes all play an essential role. The composition is austere, uncluttered and tightly framed, drawing all the more attention to the absurdity of the human condition in what is, here, a uniquely masculine environment.
Another room shows ten drawings entitled The House of Opportunity, a series which Borremans commenced in 2002 and has regularly added to since then. The house in question is a parallelepiped with a three-sided roof and hundreds of red shutters covering its walls.
The house appears again in each of the small pencil drawings and watercolours, seemingly as models, projects or monuments in environments as diverse as the open countryside and a museum room, always throwing back to the Flemish masters
This critical view of modern architecture, the repression of the "happiness for all" which society promised us, is evident in all these works.
Paradoxically, Michaël Borremans also presents an object, a white and red cube that is also an allusion to contemporary art and to sculpture, and which he makes the subject of his work, an "opportunity" for himself.
In The Hostages, his latest drawings which make up The Good Ingredients series, Michaël Borremans tackles a burning issue with ferocity and derision.
He paints bodies that have lost their identity, bodies at the mercy of those who are threatening them with guns.
These bodies, which are used as objects to be arranged into patterns, inevitably recall the images of Abou Ghraib prison in Iraq, but also countless other moments in history.
Publications
"The Performance", S.M.A.K. catalogue, Parasol unit foundation and Royal Hibernian Academy, published by Hajte Cantz 2005.
"Michaël Borremans, Zeichnungen/Tekeningen/Drawings", Cleveland Museum, S.M.A.K., Kunstmuseum Basel, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2004.
Michaël Borremans is represented by Galerie Zeno X in Antwerp and by Zwirner Gallery in New York.
MICHAEL BORREMANS, The good ingredients
Recent paintings and drawings
June 8 - September 24, 2006
La Maison Rouge - The Red House
Antoine de Galbert Foundation
10, boulevard de La Bastille –
75012 Paris
