GROUP EXHIBITION

Clément Denis investigates the barriers of communication, deploying plural works spanning from mosaic to painting, bringing the art of an artistic practice at the crossroads of the human condition. His anthropological investigation results in a gallery of portraits of individuals that he invites to feel the same state of confusion. In fact, sharing his own experience is a prerequisite to the act of painting. For the past ten years, Denis has engaged with figments of memory and explored the body as a site of consciousness in his painting practice. Over time his works have evolved from dark and rich tableaus to more expansive works with sinuous lines and a bright, acidulated palette.

‘I often paint the flow of water, as in a certain way water can absorb us’

In 2021, the lockdown due to the pandemic led him to Noirmoutier, where a premonitory dream inspired a new series – The river song. In it, he saw the island and his family home engulfed in water with only the treetops and the roof emerging. He pondered over the relentless climatic change and its consequences on nature, as well as man’s initiatory path faced with the impending unavoidable calamity.

Ever since his childhood, Fabien Verschaere followed the maxim: Not a day without a line drawn–as Apelles, an ancient Greek artist said. Nevertheless, the reality of Verschaere’s world is hidden behind enigmatic symbolism and references from history. Born with a mysterious disease, the artist was hospitalised for the first 15 years of his life–it is understandable why the focus of his work is tightly connected to the exploration of the human condition. Verschaere’s personal mythology does not lose touch with the reality–especially in his interest in telling stories of contrasts between life and death, beauty andrepulsion. Calling up the world of circus, fairy tales, comic books, and his own fantasies in a vast organised chaos between fantasy and reality, the artist invites us to look into reality through the hybrid creatures, monsters, and chimeras coming from his unbridled imagination. Artistic techniques he always comes back to are watercolours, drawings, paintings, installations, and film, and he recently experimented with painting on wood and ceramics. When looking into Verschaere’s imagery, viewers enter the world between his dreams and nightmares. While finding a source of consolation in hard times, the artist is able to create something beautiful from something that feeds on fear and abandonment.

Karen Shiozawa depicts a boundless galaxy alluding to lost memories in her paintings. The artist is consistently seeking to expand the realm of communication mediated using acrylic, oil, and alkyd resin on wooden board, to build up the exceptional appealing layers of light and shadow in the Milky Way. Growing up in Netherlands, her compositions and lines feature European elements, such as wooden wind-mills, classic-style arches, and church steeples. To present the visional and realistic scenes, Shiozawa scrapes the paint away with different sizes of technical pens. Crystal Church (2022), a featured artwork in the exhibition, depicts light passing through the stained glasses and overlapping each other, reflecting a veil of light surrounding the church building, as if the artist’s childhood memories are arising from her glass treasure box. ‘Bridging people’s consciousness to consciousness, recognition to recognition, I would like to create artworks which can capture people’s voice of heart that people could not notice in the real world,’ said Shiozawa.