HYPOKEIMENON, en Dessous du Sang at GNF Gallery

Artists: Nils Alix-Tabeling, Aline Bouvy, Jude Crilly, Emeline Depas, Nicolas Deshayes, Justin Fitzpatrick, Anna Hulacova, Motoko Ishibashi, Rebecca Jagoe, Birgit Jürgenssen

Exhibition title: HYPOKEIMENON, en Dessous du Sang

Curated by: Nils Alix-Tabeling

Venue: GNF Gallery, Brussels, Belgium

Date: April 22 – May 25, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and GNF Gallery

“There are uncertains beings, corals for example, that the three categories fight over. They are animal, mineral, and recently classified as vegetal also. Maybe this is the real moment when life in obscurity awakens from the slumber of stones, without yet detaching from this raw starting point, as if to warn us, us so proud and so highly established, of this ternary kinship, of the right of the humble mineral to grow and animates itself, and of the deep aspiration that is within Nature”.
-Jules Michelet, in “The Sea”

The exhibition Hypokeimenon, en Dessous du Sang, presents materials and objects as articulations and appendages of the space that they inhabit. The sculptures, as in the castle of the Beast in Jean Cocteau’s film, accompany and oversee the wandering of the viewers.They contains ideological substances, and communicate between themselves. The works support and decorate the internal structure of the building as frieze, caryatid, stalactite; their ‘interchangeability’ points at the tenuous architecture of an identity,constructed by the desire that birthed it, forever in a state of restructuring: communicating vessels, pouring into one another.

Blood is the starting point; bile; “foutre”.The objects, like ghouls, feed off the looks that are given to them, it is the sculptural equivalent of a blood transfusion in a vampire film, sometime curse, sometime corporeal jouissance, but always a void awaiting to be filled. In a similar way to “Genius Loci”, they are spirits of the given space, here a traditional Belgian townhouse, a family space. They become expressions of lust, desire, belief.

Nicolas Deshayes, Dear Polyp, 2016 patinated Bronze, hot water 120 x 110 x 190 cm

Nils Alix-Tabeling, Sleeping Doormans : Petrified Lovers, 2017 , Papier mâché, plaster casted teeths, chains, necklaces, keys, metal crochet, and plaster garlic cloves; Justin Fitzpatrick, Aquarius cat ( Toilette), 2016 , Oil paint, 140 x 110 cm

Nils Alix-Tabeling, Petrified Lovers; Doorman, 2017, papier mâché, wax garlic cloves, chains, necklaces, keys

Nils Alix-Tabeling, Petrified Lovers; Doorman, 2017, papier mâché, wax garlic cloves, chains, necklaces, keys

Aline Bouvy, La Vie Intense (L&S), 2016 Resin, pigments, jesmonite. Edition of 3

Justin Fitzpatrick, Emeline Depas, installation view from HYPOKEIMENON, en Dessous du Sang, GNF Gallery

Emeline Depas, Sorry for not Being There, 2017, Waxed Towels, Wax and flowers

Justin Fitzpatrick, A rabbit imagines what it’s insides look like, 2016, Oil paint, 50x70cm

Nils Alix-Tabeling, Donau Wasser; Tears of Joy-Tears of Sorrow, 2017 Papier mâché, plaster cast, and dry flowers, Water from the Danube, 70 x 70 x 70 cm