Helmut Stallaerts at Parliament

Artist: Helmut Stallaerts

Exhibition title: Meta Ages

Venue: Parliament, Paris, France

Date: November 4, 2022 – January 7, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Parliament, Paris

Parliament is pleased to announce Meta Ages, the second solo exhibition of Helmut Stallaerts at the gallery, open November 4, 2022, to January 7, 2023.

We hear the noice, but we don’t listen
We say we arrived, but we didn’t move
We forfeit the lot, but we remain blind

In a fraction, we come to a point
Where boundaries blur
Where lines intertwine
To touch
What can no longer be shade

In Meta Ages, the new work of Helmut Stallaerts, a space is entered where time as we know it is absent. Past and future have no linear time lapse. The measurable time dimension is released. That space is an unknown vacuum. A field without recognizable doors and walls. Without seeable beginnings and endings. An area that can’t be enclosed. Unlike in the formatted world, we can’t go on the run. Or cut ourself off, in order to fit into existing moulds. We get in touch with an underlying energy that connects everything like a red thread. It becomes clear that there’s a cyclical movement of underexposed, self-repeating and changeable patterns. Meta Ages converts that movement into paintings and strives to highlight what has always been present. It is a reflection of a personal, but also of a collective history. The binder is the imagination. It transforms and carries within it the creative, not the pre-chewed, constructed fantasy, or virtual illusions, but that which is timeless and universal.

The timeline in Meta Ages is a matrix, the axes have a changeable face. Interwoven with Jungian aspects such as one’s own shadow, the collective unconscious, the anima/animus. The question is whether the true face can be achieved when the shifting is continued.

Helmut Stallaerts was born in 1982 in Brussels (Belgium). He studied painting at the Academy of Saint Lukas, Brussels (Belgium) and graduated in 2004 from the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts (Germany). His work has been exhibited at the CAB Art Center in Bruxelles (Belgium), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle (Belgium), the Maison Rouge in Paris (France), Ibid Projects in London (United Kingdom), Baronian/Xippas gallery in Brussels (Belgium), Kunsthaus Zürich (Switzerland) and Mori Museum Tokyo (Japan).