Carlotta Bailly-Borg & Charlotte vander Borght at Island

Artists: Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Charlotte vander Borght

Exhibition title: C H A M B R E S

Curated by: Michel François

Venue: Island, Brussels, Belgium

Date: May 18 – June 29, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Island, Brussels

Charlotte vander Borght / Carlotta Bailly-Borg, a promising artistic collaboration that starts off with a homo-phony.

While the first is said to be more of a sculptor than a painter, the opposite is said of the latter. Yet Carlotta’s paintings are objects while Charlotte’s objects look very similar to paintings.

Together they have created a canework floor that allows the visitor to walk over the darkest of depths. The ambiguous presence of this object-image floor directly influences the visitor’s perception of space as well as all the objects found therein.

This spatial experience is a decisive displacement of mind. The exhibition room is transformed into a place of waiting or transit, a sort of dreamlike space. It is now a scene inhabited by someone who is noticeably absent, but whose changing psychologies and moods have seemingly permeated the surface of everything perceptible.

There are sculptured, hanging waiting room seats, airport recliners, dentist chairs and even psychologists’ couches… a hybrid mix of signs cum ergonomic objects.

In the basement, at the foot of a spiral staircase lies an anthropomorphically ear-shaped shell.

There are collapsed earthenware pots made into figures. Bawdy, tired faces and bodies take form in the surface of the soft clay and elsewhere, like repeating patterns on torn wallpaper.

We are witness to the creation of an unimaginable mental landscape where artefacts inspired by household objects – transformed and bordering on the absurd – are installed around this improbable and fantastic floor.

-Michel François