HEAT COMPANY at After Howl

Artists: Cyril Baldi, Ludovic Beillard, François Bousquet, Manuela Braud, Baptiste Brunello, Arthur Calloud, Amaury Daurel, Victor Delestre, Sybille Deligne, Morgan Dulong, Miguel Goncalves, Lea Guldditte Hestelund, Coraline Guilbeau, François De Jonge, Romain Juan, Tom Król, Sukrii Kural, Rémi Lambert, Guillaume Lambot, Lucas Lejeune, Tilman O’Donnell, Vasilis Papageorgiou, Marie Sardin, Rémy Tith, Cecile Ullerup Schmidt, Maja Moesgaard, Anders Bulow, Hannah Heilmann, Asbjørn Skou

Exhibition title: HEAT COMPANY

Curated by: After Howl, Carl Martin Faurby, Komplot, Deborah Bowmann

Venue: After Howl, Brussels, Belgium

Date: April 23 – May 7, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists, After Howl, Carl Martin Faurby, Deborah Bowmann, Fabian Home, Komplot, Super Structure

In Heat Company, After Howl plays around and pursue the very logics around which it was built: the recycling of an alphabet of forms that can be as functional as decorative, studio space and life as core material and finally, an economy verging on ecology, between pure expenditure and revolutionary constructions.

In this sense Heat Company puts forth histories of After Howl: a mythology of contradictory versions, held together by retroactive continuity, a mythology like those found in families. The double motif of the campfire made out of scratch and of the domestic fireplace is the starting point. From there a theoritical net of PER pipes brings that heat, transforms and recycles it. To survive of out of comfort, we gather, the problematic of being a group is thus extended to kin structures and artists.

The entrance opens on THE BRIDGE, who runs along the wall in the shape of a green hydrofuge bridge where overfilled fountains leak from rain water. The makeshift roof of sandstone ends in a plaster wall of trompe-l’oeil bricks. Komplot sits there with Vassilis Papageorgiou and Trom Król. At the heart of the space, the PATIO is a concrete hall pierced by burning tubes and wires, its floor covered in a thin oil layer. Brows sweat and skins brown under surnatural rays of love. Super Structure and Sybille Deligne stand there in a UFO coming out of the ground. THE SCENE is a blue and chrome sports hall, a gym boudoir in which to get ready, precious in its ornaments, rational in its function. The main stairs run along the wall before drifting to THE KITCHEN. The Kitchen is wooden and steamy, its pyramid oven of fire-bricks and boilers heat the entire building. From there,the Nightshop lights makes us linger with fresh beers and tender cigarettes. Further is the SNOW ROOM, a clean and white half-stair in which ones struggles to make way between Fabian Home and Deborah Bowmann with Horrible Bise, all behind their respective desks. Next door, tango is danced. THE BALL ROOM is entirely moving along with the dancers, themselves in tension with the body upfront, all orbiting around the ancient boxing ring. Dancing, Carl Martin Faurby, Cyril Baldi, Cecile Ullerup Schmidt and Lea Guldditte Hestelund chase one another at the rythm of a Scarlet Pineapple. On the terrace, something cooks in the cast-iron pan hung by chains over a woodscraps fire. The thing passes through the different stages of the Maillard reaction. Just like it, we too let ourselves get tender, before covering ourselves in a big brown coat of gold and fry, letting go of unnecessary fats, finally becoming new, ready to rebuild everything, together.