Episode 19

FRIENDLY FACES
An assembly of Belgian faces curated by Middlemarch, Brussels

Charlotte Beaudry, Martin Belou, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, Sébastien Bonin, Aline Bouvy, Patrick Carpentier, Joachim Coucke, Eric Croes, Claire Decet, Samuel François, Valérian Goalec, Stephan Goldrajch, Brice Guilbert, Egon van Herreweghe, Benjamin Hugard, Martin Laborde, Jacques Lizene, Julien Meert, Justin Morin, Benoit Platéus, Robert Suermondt, David de Tscharner, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys.

Opening November 19, 2015
Exhibition until December 19 

JOHANNES VOGT GALLERY
526 W 26th St #205, New York, NY 10001, États-Unis
www.johannesvogt.nyc



David de Tscharner, Faces, video loop, 2014


A teenage girl who claimed 56 stars were tattooed on her face as she slept when she'd only asked for three has admitted she was awake the whole time - and lied because her father was 'furious'.

Belgian Kimberley Vlaminck said last week she woke up in horror to find her face covered in the stars of various sizes which spread out over the left-hand side of her head. She went on to blame the Flemish-speaking tattooist for not being able to understand her French and English instructions.

Amid a frenzy of media attention, she then vowed to sue tattoo artist Rouslan Toumaniantz for the 13,000 Euros she needs for laser surgery to have them removed. She said after the tattooing: 'It is terrible for me. I cannot go out on to the street. I look like a freak.' But the 18-year-old has finally confessed she did not fall asleep, that she wanted all the stars and was 'fully aware' of what Toumaniantz was doing.

Miss Vlaminck told a Dutch TV crew: 'I asked for 56 stars and initially adored them. 'But when my father saw them, he was furious. 'So I said I fell asleep and that the tattoist had made a mistake.'

Toumaniantz - himself covered from head to foot in tattoos and piercings - had consistently denied he had made a mistake and always insisted Vlaminck wanted all 56 stars. He said at the time: 'I maintain that she absolutely agreed that I tattoo those 56 stars on the left side of her face.'

But despite insisting Vlaminck had asked for 56 stars, he still initially agreed to pay for half of the treatment to remove the tattoos. He said: 'Kimberley is unhappy and it is not my wish to have an unsatisfied client. 'I don't regret it. To tell you the truth, this has given me some publicity.'

Toumanaintz is now said to have withdrawn his offer and said from now on he will get written consent from clients before he begins tattooing.

The Daily Mail, 23 June 2009




















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Episode 18

STEPHANE GOLDRAJCH
BRODEUR

Opening Tuesday, September 8, 2015, 5-8 pm
Exhibition open during Brussels Art Days:
Friday, September 11 from 12 to 8 pm
Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 from 12 to 6 pm



Stephan Goldrajch & Myriam Rispens


For their latest project set in the domestic space of an apartment, Middlemarch invited Stephan Goldrajch (1985, lives and works in Brussels), an artist whose practice is confined to the intimacy of the home through his predilection for embroidery.

"Thread," he says, "is, I think, the word that qualifies me the most distinctly, literally and figuratively. My process incorporates different techniques (crocheting, weaving, embroidering, sewing…) and is based on the very essence of the word 'link.' Embroidery constitutes one of my preferred fields of investigation. I appreciate the rigor the technique imposes and how it symbolises another era: where time and duration were imperative, determining factors. I'm what you could call an artist-artisan-weaver. I like to think of artisanship as characteristic of a commitment to excellence."

Stephan Goldrajch's work is based on questioning hierarchies: between noble and popular arts, as well as between "insider" and "outsider" audiences. For his Middlemarch project, Goldrajch will realize a monumental work of embroidery. Taking advantage of the occasion, exhibition visitors will be called on to realize, together, a collective, giant work of embroidery.

Beyond the links that will form among those gathered to embroider, Stephan Goldrajch also instils a shamanic element in the project. Gestural repetition suggests a simple, hypnotic movement, capable of engendering singular moments in various states favorable to reflection and exchange.

Stephan Goldrajch is steeped in the oral tradition, and enjoys playing with various codes: bringing crocheting, embroidery and sewing, generally associated with women and older people, into contemporary art.

For him, this tradition is associated with ritual and magic. It is within the intimacy of the home that women work together on these "minor" tasks while telling stories. In the European countryside of the past, and still today in some faraway nations, where the Kantha in Bengal and the Suzani in Central Asia continue to be weaved.

The embroidery-artwork becomes a charged object, as defined in shamanism: respectful of the 3 bodies (mental, astral and physical) associated with 3 levels: the believer who prepares the talisman, he who receives the talisman and also believes in it, and the object itself, endowed with power.

Stephan Goldrajch uses his art practice as a pretext for creating encounters and discussions - a vital concern for the artist today.

Translation Benjamin Crotty


































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Episode 17

MIDDLEMARCH AT NEWD ART SHOW
THE 1896, 592 JOHNSON AVENUE, NY 11237

Saturday, June 6th and Sunday, June 7th, 2015, noon - 7 pm
First look (invitation only) on Friday, June 5th, 2015, 6:30-9:30 pm

Benoit Platéus, Kodak Flexicolor, Urethane, 2015


Middlemarch is thrilled to announce its participation
to the 2015 edition of NEWD Art Show in Bushwick.

NEWD Art Show brings together strong local curatorial voices –among them artist collectives, project spaces, nonprofits, and artist-run galleries– to share 7,000 sq ft of open warehouse space during Bushwick Open Studios.
A counterpoint to the existing art fair model, NEWD features diverse participants with ambitious, experimental programming. The event also host talks addressing artist economics in today's art market.
By championing grassroots, content-driven initiatives, NEWD aims to invigorate the fair model. A response to the expansion of the art market and the erosion of the traditional gallery system, the fair fosters a conversation about alternative ways to engage and support emerging artists. NEWD also promotes artists' interests by offering negotiated resale royalty agreements.
NEWD's location and timing reflects its artist-centric mission, re-contextualizing the art fair by situating it in the territory of art production.

Middlemarch will present new works by Claire Decet, Samuel François,
Benoit Platéus and David de Tscharner.

The 1896
592 Johnson Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11237

info@newdartshow.com
www.newdartshow.com






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Episode 16

A RETRO-PROSPECTIVE
CURATED BY CODE MAGAZINE 2.0

Opening Thursday, April 23, 2015, 5-10 pm
Extended opening hours during Art Brussels: Sat. 10am-8pm, Sun. 10am-1pm
and by appointment on Friday and Sunday


Philippe Quesne / Vivarium Studio, Taupe Code, 2015


For its 20th issue and 10th anniversary, Code Magazine (2005-2015) proposes a "retro-prospective" at Middlemarch: an exhibition conceived as a three dimensional extension of the prospective content of the publication. It is a retrospective of new works, often never-before-seen, to take you from the position of homo magazinus seated reading to that of the standing homo expositus.

Retrospection is not in Code Magazine's DNA. Since its creation in Brussels in 2005 and its transplantation to Paris in 2010, the magazine has been concerned with new generations and forms of expression, resolutely turned toward the future. However, the latest Parisian issue offers the opportunity to look in the rearview mirror this spring, and to ask how our choices, our editorial line and our invited guests fit in the artistic landscape – if they constitute a familiar horizon or atypical curiosities.

If the imaginary museum of published artists were inaugurated tomorrow, the visitor would discover the following modern museographic sections: "Painting and pictorial experimentation" featuring Roxane Borujerdi's neo-concrete work, Ruth Van Haren Noman's false naivety, and Matthieu Blanchard's and Céline Vaché-Olivieri's material experiments. "Reflections on the medium" would bring together Constance Nouvel's volumetric photographs, Valentin Bouré's unframed frames, Camila Oliveira Fairclough's cloth-wrapped signs, Xavier Antin's multimedia occurrences and Pierre Paulin's half-real half-digital Constellations. "Archaic practices and ethno-ism," definitely an important section, would include the pagan totems of Ferruel & Guédon, the graphic heraldry of Eric Giraudet de Boudemange, the animal mimetism of Louise Deltrieux, the ornamented sausages of Cécile Noguès, the kitten-like assemblages of Laurent Le Deunff, the augmented tapestries of Appriou & Kaës and the magic realism of Rometti & Costales. "Found images and ideas" would be a cabinet, confronting Guillaume Constantin's quotidian ghosts, Gaëlle Cintré's biting regard, and Florian Sumi's sci-fi experiments. Lastly, "An instruction manual for life" would bring together the video auscultations of Pauline Curnier-Jardin and Eléonore Saintagnan & Grégoire Motte, engaging with the real and beyond.

On the pediment of the museum we'd engrave: "In art's recognition of its narrators." Because what brings together so many of these artists is the desire to recount alternative histories whose meticulously constructed scaffolding create an illusion of perfect verisimilitude. Their stories move away from commonly accepted official accounts, rummaging through the various material and manners of telling, making everything fair game, from hierarchies to the stuff of daily life.

Like the review itself, the exhibition follows intuitive choices, without making distinctions between mediums and esthetics – not in an absence of thought, but so that thought itself yields to the intelligence of the heart. It is an assembly built on affection and practices, a reunion of artists that we've followed and who have, in turn, accompanied us. An exhibition conceived with these artists rather than above or through them; Code Magazine has never attempted putting them in categories or creating successive neologisms for them – in short, has never sought to instrumentalize them. We've left the reader the liberty of tracing his or her own path among these inclinations and exercising his or her own taste. As such, this exhibition resembles the review at a reduced scale, presenting in fine a miscellaneous selection of the most recent generation of artists.


– Laetitia Chauvin & Clément Dirié

www.codemagazine.fr









































































































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Episode 15

PATRICK CARPENTIER
CONVERSATION WITH A BIRD

Opening Friday, February 20, 2015, 5-9 pm
Exhibition open on Saturday, February 21, 2-6 pm and performance at 4 pm



Untitled, book, microphone, stand, dimensions variable, 2015


You can't approach Patrick Carpentier's work frontally and his practice can't be easily summed up. Cinema, stage design and literature, photography and sculpture are all mediums he has progressively mixed together in a highly studied approach to installation. The density of his propositions is inversely proportional to their formal minimalism, and one is tempted to draw up a list of references, stories and experiences – sometimes very intimate – reinforcing the invisible thread of a discreet conceptual intention. Except things are more complex, crafty and uncontrollable. Everything seems as if, instead of an intention – a deliberately eloquent, oppositional and structuring one – Patrick Carpentier seeks to generate a state. A state that has done away with situations, refusing by its very neutrality a fate of calculation and speculation.

The artist's two major influences are Carl André and Morandi. André for sculpture as space, with no axis, imposing no particular point of view and, stated perhaps too hastily, Morandi for his monochromatic palette. Dehierachization, a taste for emptiness and horizontality form an ethos whose esthetic characteristics ("it always ends up beautiful," he says almost regretfully) are the consequences of a long period of polishing and reduction that neutralizes the violence, sometimes so gentle, that reality constantly imposes upon us.

The current work draws on a collection of photographs of places meant for play. Skate parks, jungle gyms and slides are so many deserted architectural forms, caught in a state of emptiness. At dawn or dusk, dew drops form on tubular posts and peeling paint. The atmosphere is sad and beautiful, melancholy and almost tragic. But these images, far from rolling out the usual clichés (fragility of existence, lost innocence…) evoke a deafening and hyper-normative force. The playground first and foremost denotes a frontier, the space-time of a delineated release. It is consubstantial with surveillance and control, that of the body and of the mind. These images are the starting point of a process of cutting-off and imprisoning that moves these spaces towards a graphic and plastic reconfiguration. If the contours of the marble plaques placed on the ground are those of game modules, their solid, blind surfaces abolish by abstraction any suggestion of their origin. Decontextualization and reexamination: the architecture is stripped of its evocative charge. Once this zero degree has been attained, what is left on the ground is a smooth and suspensive remainder, liberated of any direction, bearing or anecdote. Far from any form of esthetic formalism, it is rather a veritable spreading of wings to take flight.

And this is where the critical machine can vacillate, but what do we want from art if not – at the very least – to unfold subjectivity and liberate itself from culture to – at best – rearrange it a little? The Brancusi affair (opposing the artist and US customs, who refused to grant his sculptures the status of "artwork" favoring the less glorious distinction of construction materials) is emblematic of symbolic struggles opposing artists and the normative enterprise of common sense. In this exhibition, Patrick Carpentier associates an extract from the Bird in Space lawsuit with a page of dictionary that exhaustively lists Latinate bird names. The ironic association of these two archives opens the question of meaning and modern regimes of qualification. One could amuse oneself infinitely extending networks of meaning linking Brancusi's flight to that of a swing or endlessly questioning the reproduction of play-spaces in construction materials, whose nature itself is ambivalent (the choice of marble is hardly innocent). Except Patrick Carpentier's practice is not purely conceptual or critical, and if art history reinforces the work it isn't the veritable concern. The third text presented, by Le Corbusier, is an invitation to "take possession of the space," which is to say of the possible. On this note, in Patrick Carpentier's studio there is a work that's almost impossible to show, broken away from pedestals and walls, infra-thin and ingeniously taboo. A metallic rod no thicker than a match and no longer than 20 centimeters. On a first viewing, nothing. We won't be spoiling any secret by revealing that the work is made out of jewels inherited by the artist from his mother. Melted, stretched, fired again, amalgamated and blackened, only the surfaces at the two extremities bear witness to the brilliance of the gold that constitutes the sculpture. The minimal expression of a life, but also of a cultural model (filiation and transmission), here stripped of its weight. Neutral and perfectly intense, Timeline suggests a state of insane lightness, of liberty won from on high.

Essay by Benoit Dusart
Translated by Benjamin Crotty

_

Patrick Carpentier (Brussels, 1966) trained to body expression and stage direction by Jacques Lecoq method, he quickly switches to scenography, lighting and video for the musical industry. He worked with many musicians as John Parish (2013), Cocoon, Bertrand Belin (2006) or l'Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles (2001). His movies Walden (2009), Les 9 mardis (2005) ou God is a dog (2004) have been screened in several international film festivals (Seattle film festival, Visions du Réel, La Cinémathèque Française ) of wich the Berlinale where Combat (Forum 2006) was awarded by a special prize of the jury.
Since 2010 his works finds a plastic outcome in sculpture and photography with exhibitions presented by JAP (2010, 2011) la biennale d'Arts Visuels de Liège (2012), le Ciap à Hasselt (2012) and a solo exhibition for Rossi Contemporary (2013). He remains engaged in the performance field with Le Monologue d'Andrès (2013).
In 2015 he takes part to the residency program at Wiels.





































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Episode 14

173 EAST 94th STREET / CHAUSSÉE DE WATERLOO 550

Darja Bajagic, Aaron Bobrow, Will Boone, Graham Collins, Ethan Cook,
Paul Cowan, Antoine Donzeaud, Keltie Ferris, Max Frintrop, Andrew J Greene,
Bas van den Hurk, Zak Kitnick, Dean Levin, Michael Manning, Landon Metz,
Robert Motherwell, Nikholis Planck, Nathlie Provosty, Jessica Sanders,
Cory Scozzari, Don Voisine.

Curated by Alex Bacon
In collaboration with Paul Kasmin Gallery

Opening Friday October 17, 2014, 5-9 pm
Exhibition until December 6 by appointment only

With support from Jos Knaepen Collection - Fondation Roi Baudouin
and Eeckman Art & Insurance



Robert Motherwell in Provincetown, 1969.  Dedalus Foundation Archives



Middlemarch, in collaboration with the Paul Kasmin Gallery, is pleased to present an exhibition curated by Alex Bacon: "173 E 94th St. / Chaussée de Waterloo 550".

Referencing the New York City apartment where seminal Abstract Expressionist artist Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) lived from 1953 to 1971, and the domestic site of Middlemarch, this exhibition brings together work by twenty emerging and established contemporary artists who have risen to the challenge of entering into a dialogue with Motherwell's enduring legacy. The casual and spontaneous, but often serious and penetrating conversations about art, aesthetics, and ideas that frequently occurred in Motherwell's home—throughout which art, by himself and others, was installed—provides the inspiration for this exhibition in an intimate apartment space.

Motherwell's legacy is considered here in terms of both the formal and intellectual issues explored in his artwork, and in regards to the stakes for abstraction he established in his writing. Under this umbrella a selection of some of the most significant artists working abstractly today have been brought together, and through this rigorous lens what is foregrounded is the complex conversation they are having amongst themselves, with other artists, with larger social and political issues, and with history. This is an urgently necessary framing in a time when contemporary abstraction is often reductively considered as either somehow out of time and naively historically unaware, or as a canny rehashing of tired modernist tropes. By bringing into the conversation a figure such as Motherwell clarity is given to the kind of debt a younger generation might owe to the past, as well as proposing what new issues are raised by this recent work.

All of this is suggested visually on the walls of Middlemarch. Two classic works on paperfrom the 1960s by Motherwell (lent by the Fondation Roi Baudouin, Brussels) anchor the selection by twenty younger artists. Surveying the grouping installed throughout the space, it is left open to the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions from considering the works on view. All of the artists are unified in their decision to actively take up the challenge of making a work, or group of works, in relation to Motherwell's legacy.

Despite the deliberately open-ended, dialogic premise of the exhibition, most all of the artists have chosen to engage Motherwell's precedents directly, working through, in a contemporary way, some of the elder artist's favored and recurrent formal and intellectual concerns. The breadth of work on view by these artists in turn points back to the great diversity and depth of Motherwell's over five decade long career.

For example, numerous artists, from Will Boone, to Don Voisine, to Jessica Sanders have explored the Motherwellian trope of having one or more forms take over most of the field, and in doing so pushing the boundaries of geometric and biomorphic form. Others, like Landon Metz, Dean Levin, and Nathlie Provosty echo the sparser of Motherwell's fields, taking on that same hybrid language of organic and structured form to generate more lyrical compositions. Many of the artists have found much to engage with in Motherwell's approach to collage, which can be found in Boone's work, as well as in Darja Bagajic's St. / Chaussée de Waterloo 550." video piece, Nikholis Planck's assemblages of the past two years of studio debris, Zak Kitnick's juxtaposition of loose graphite marks and printed samples of appropriated stock advertising imagery of fruits and vegetables, Andrew J Greene's solitaire collage, and Ethan Cook's mounted piece of hammered gold.

Additional artists have taken on Motherwell's signature means of mark-making, as in the quick, but bold strokes of Aaron Bobrow's drawings, Michael Manning's computer generated paintings, Bas van den Hurk's painting, and Max Frintrop's paintings and works on paper. The complex ways that Motherwell handled pictorial space in various series can be seen in Keltie Ferris's dense spatial layerings, Paul Cowan's expansive, minimally inflected surfaces that are broken up only by a few choicely placed fishing lures, and the nearly monochromatic surfaces of Cook and Frintrop. Still others explore the Surrealist notions of automatism and automatic gestures that grounded Motherwell's painterly approach from the start, such as Antoine Donzeaud's flipped paintings of older, representational works reversed, the turpentine and oil seeping through to generate the composition, Graham Collins's stitching together of multiple found antique canvases, and Cory Scozzari's quick, fluid marks over generic, placeless iPhone photographs of bodies of water.

Despite the direct connections that can be traced between all of the artists' work and Motherwell's, the hope is that this very specific conversation can be expanded to a rigorous consideration of the relevance of those problematics today, as well as in what other ways the artists may move away from, and even critique Motherwell's precedent.

This exhibition is presented concurrently with Robert Motherwell: Works on Paper 1951-1991 at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, which will be on view from October 30th, 2014 - January 3rd, 2015.


































































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Episode 13

THE IDEAL

Graham Anderson, James Ensor, Paul Gabrielli,
Romain Poussin, Richard Tinkler, Jules Van Paemel

Opening Wednesday September 10, 2014, 5-9 pm
Exhibition until Saturday October 4 by appointment

"Ideal form interests me because it's an impossibility," explains American Paul Gabrielli (1982) who we've invited for the 13th episode of Middlemarch. The impossible is something he consistently seeks out, "I'll have this idea of what I want and somehow, somehow think it already exists in the world, and I go searching for it but never find it, and have to make it, in the end. The ideal that I already have in my head, I need to bring it to life somehow."

This unconditional search for an absolute calls to mind the thinking of fin de siècle French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), and the Belgian painter Jean Delville, creator of the review L'Art idéaliste (1897-1898). Seeing themselves as demiurges, called to fulfill a social, intellectual, artistic and sometimes even religious mission, they tear down the border between art and life, frequently becoming theoreticians of their own visions.

To acknowledge these historical precursors, we have integrated two emblematic works on loan from Eric Gillis Fine Art: the print La Cathédrale by James Ensor (1860-1959), who theorized his own creative quest – L'Art Ensor, and Jules Van Paemel's (1896-1968) La Tour de Babel, a timeless work addressing an iconographic theme dear to artists, a symbol of their desire to assemble a universal knowledge.

To these two tutelary figures, as well as Paul Gabrielli, we've added the Americans Graham Anderson (US, 1981) and Richard Tinkler (USA, 1975) and the French painter Romain Poussin (1986). All entertain a particular, almost obsessive, relationship with their work. Their sense of time is one of slow maturation in the studio, of introspection, of permanent renegotiation with themselves.

All three share a deep commitment to craftsmanship in the realization of their works. Paul Gabrielli creates sculptures that look like assemblages of manufactured objects but, upon closer examination, reveal themselves to be meticulously fashioned, almost imperceptible works of trompe-l'oeil. Graham Anderson makes fastidious pointillist paintings that leave the canvas largely exposed, allowing for no margin of error. Richard Tinkler produces an enormous quantity of drawings according to precise rules as well as a system of classification and repetition that, according to the artist, "are an attempt to escape from freedom, (...) in a time when we are told that we can do anything we want." In just as singular a fashion, each of Romain Poussin's painting is produced in a series of two, added to the stock of painted works, and further manipulated and combined, to form a subtle, changing corpus of pictorial charades.

The delicacy and the concentration with which they work do not result in showy or overly seductive works, nor demonstrations of conceptual perfection. On the contrary, one frequently finds imperfections, unfinished portions and blind spots in the work. What preoccupies them is too important to be clearly stated, too ambitious to be reduced to simple illustration.

This extreme attention in execution is essential, however, for these young artists, who hold art in high regard, higher even than themselves. Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Collet dated 21 May 1853, wrote, "A soul measures itself in proportion to its desire, as we judge a cathedral before seeing it on the height of its bell tower."

Graham Anderson, born 1981, lives and works in New York. He has recently exhibited at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, Nice and Fit, Berlin, White Columns in New York, Andrea Melas & Helena Papadopoulos in Athens. He was artist-in-residence at Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels in 2011. He is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York.

Paul Gabrielli, born 1982, lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited in institutions and galleries both internationally and domestically, including the Cartier Foundation, Paris, 303 Gallery and Eleven Rivington, New York, the Verge Gallery, Sacramento. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Cartier Foundation. His work has been featured in ArtForum, The Paris Review, Art Review, Mousse Magazine and City Arts, among others. Paul is represented by Invisible Exports Gallery in New York.

Romain Poussin, born 1986, lives and works in Brussels. He is cofounder of the project space Apes&Castles opening in October 2014 in Brussels.

Richard Tinkler, born 1975, lives and works in New York. He's currently in the three-person show The Rosebud Roar at Re Institute, an artist run space in upstate New York, as well as the group show Tomorrow's Man opening August 30th, 2014 at Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, and curated by Jack Pierson.








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Episode 12

PEGGY FRANCK & FREEK WAMBACQ

Opening Saturday April 19, 2014, 5-9 pm
Exhibition until May 17 by appointment only

Peggy Franck (Zevenaar, NL, 1978) completed her residency at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include 'A household without responsibilities' OUTPOST, Norwich, UK (2013); 'Sudden parallels between the sky and the concrete' Fons Welters, Amsterdam, NL (2012); 'Drawing from a store of thought' Künstlerhaus Bethaniën, Berlin, DE (2011); 'In Rocking Motion' Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, DE (2009).  Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Photographers Gallery, London, UK (2013); Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, IE (2013); Autocenter, Berlin, DE (2013); Dorothea Schlüter, Hamburg, DE, (2012); (SIC), Brussels, BE (2012); Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, FR (2011); FOAM, Amsterdam, NL (2011); Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK (2011); among others. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam, NL in October 2014.


Freek Wambacq (b. 1978, Brussels) has presented his work in solo exhibitions at Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, BE (2013); (SIC), Brussels, BE (2012); Museum M, Leuven, BE (2011); Künstlerhaus Bethaniën, Berlin, DE (2011); and GelerieElisa Platteau, Brussels, BE (2009); as well as in group exhibitions at Magazin4-Bregenzer Kunstverein, Bregenz, AT (2014); Askeaton Contemporary Arts, Askeaton, IR (2013); Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, NL (2012); Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, BE (2012); M HKA, Antwerp, BE (2012); Spazio A, Pistoia, IT (2011); Casino Luxembourg, LU (2011); Queen's Nails Projects, San Francisco, US (2009); among many others.























































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Episode 11

EN-TRÉE
A GROUP SHOW CURATED BY CHRISTOPHER GREEN

Opening Saturday January 25, 2014, 5-9 pm
Exhibition until February 22 by appointment only

En-trée

              Served
before
              the main course
the
act
of
entering
              into
              a suite

Introducing nine artists; Bobby Dowler, Sophie Giraux, Oliver Griffin, Ralph Hunter-Menzies, Robert Janitz, Shaun McDowell, Nicolas Roggy, Sofia Stevi, John Tremblay, living and working in London, Athens, New York, Paris.

Here, works by artists who have entered my life during recent travels are introduced to works by old friends. Some of them already know each other, some do not. I have met everyone involved, and have invited them. I am excited by these artists. My line of interest is rooted in their individually varied approaches to making, and the consequent affinity I feel with their works. It is their coming together for the first time that intrigues me most.

              Like a dinner party.

From some I have selected specific works - from others I have left it for them to decide. Each work has a distinct manner and makes no promise to be courteous to its neighbour. The works included; books, paintings, sculptures, projection - inhabit the space, interchanged with the apartment's usual furnishings. A show of slides, a photo album, the travel of time, a postcard and the experience, a souvenir collected, that mysterious bottle.

              I'll be in the kitchen.

Christopher Green
January 2014

Download the PDF with Vincent Clay's performance text











































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Episode 10

RUTH VAN HAREN NOMAN & WIEKI SOMERS
SPATIO TEMPO (The Other Life of Forms)
Curated by Clément Dirié

Opening Saturday November 23, 2013, 5-9 pm
Exhibition until December 21 by appointment only

© Elspeth Diederix


Beyond the studio window, the port of Rotterdam unfolds: its cranes, wharfs and horizon. Studio Wieki Somers’ models from the series Mitate are lined up in the foreground, miniaturized samurais and makeshift bonsais seemingly awaiting their destiny: life size – between 210 and 260 cm – and a function, to light with extra soul. In Japanese, “mitate” means to look at an object in a different way from usual, to imagine that thing as something else, allowing renewed experimentation – a philosophy that the Studio Weiki Somers has made its own, practicing a “magical realism” of design that brings out fantasy in the most common of objects.

For a creator, three horizons seem possible, each implying singular spaces and times. For the painter, as for the novelist, the window frame is one. Dreaming of what happens on the other side, while remaining on your own – the Madame Bovary syndrome. A second horizon is distant, exotic, sublime – the one Casper David Friedrich’s miniature men contemplate: an elsewhere of travel that Wieki Somers has crystallized through drawing - before coming to the third dimension of design – the pseudo-morphism between their lamps and a suit of samurai armor, a stone garden, a puppet from Japanese repertory theater, or the face of a geisha.

A third horizon, the most secret one, is that of the interior world, of the internal and fantastic life of forms – the introspective mirror stage: what Ruth van Haren Noman draws on for the essence of her paintings. From the simplicity of the formal arrangements and tints to their arbitrary association are born compositions, sometimes anthropomorphic, sometimes geometric, where naivety and mystery fight for dominance, in calm movements of infinite transfer, between equilibrium and imbalance, identity and difference, fringe and center, decorative vocabulary and declarative language.

Rather than a dialogue, this joint exhibition is a combination. On the walls, a selection of works by Ruth van Haren Noman present her at once profound and candid universe. In the middle, arranged as if in a mineral garden, Wieki Somers’ models – that accompany a series of drawings – reveal the preliminary step of design research, when conception first tests out a physical form. To each her own territory and means of expression, but this hypothetical comparison is based on their similar taste for that space where the familiar is the flip side of otherness, where the contemporary and the timeless – be it brute, artisanal, stylistic – meet, and where forms are an inexhaustible playground.

(I forgot a forth horizon, that of the frame and the pedestal, of the hypothetical spectator).

– Clément Dirié

Born in 1975, Ruth van Haren Noman lives and works in Gent. She is represented by Base-Alpha Gallery, Antwerp, which hosted her last solo show in 2012.

Born in 1976, Wieki Somers founded Studio Wieki Somers with Dylan van den Berg in 2003 in Rotterdam. Boijmans van Beuningen Museum (Rotterdam) will organize a retrospective of her design in Fall 2014. She is represented by Galerie kreo (Paris) where her new light series Mitate was presented in the Summer of 2013.

Born in 1981, Clément Dirié is an art critic, an independent curator and an editor for JRP|Ringier publishing house.

Many thanks to Ruth van Haren Noman, Wieki Somers and Noortje van den Elzen, as well as to Galerie kreo, especially Clémence & Didier Krzentowski, and Charlotte Brosse.

www.ruthvanharennoman.be
www.wiekisomers.com

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Episode 9

SAM KORMAN AND ISRAEL LUND
MATERIAL ISSUE #49

Opening Thursday September 5, 2013, 5-9 pm
Exhibition until October 3 by appointment only

She looked at the store. With light tears forming at the edges of her eyes, the plants appeared to her like an audience, or the film crew who had just witnessed her performance, affecting the greenery with a spectatorial awe and silence. She looked at the X cactus like it was an award awaiting her grasp, as though, in the melding of fantasy and reality, she achieved something between the two worlds. Maury followed the plants’ course around the room and arrived at the X cactus again. They were both looking at it now, each attributing something entirely different to the botanical accident that had become to any regular customer a queer emblem of the florist and gold buyers shop. For Lexa, the X became less and less real, less alive, appearing sculpted, deliberate, decided, and meant for her alone. In Maury’s eyes, the cactus struggled to stay alive, to remain balanced, becoming less like an object and more fragile, more temporary. For Maury, it seemed like the X cactus existed in a fourth dimension, that though only a few years old, it bore the weight of all the years it was to live in each moment. For Lexa, the X cactus transcended life. Though for different reasons, and representing different desires, they looked at the X cactus for another two or three minutes, before Maury returned to his newspaper in the back of the shop, and Lexa, getting up from the stool, watered a few of the hanging plants, returned the watering can, packed her bag, and left for the day.


Israel Lund and Sam Korman will be presenting Material Issues #49. Part of an ongoing collaboration, Material Issues stems from the material and conversational exchange between Lund and Korman and has taken numerous forms including books, fanzines, exhibitions, and performances, as well as informal found art works and unrealizable projects. For MI#49, ekphrasis – the description of a work of art in literature, poetry, or drama – provides the foundation for the collaboration.

For the exhibition, Korman has written a short story titled Scenes from Memento Maury’s Florist and Gold Buyers or Of No Inherent Value, which is set in the eponymous store and traces issues surrounding the construction of value and death. Deliberately unfinished, excerpts from the story will appear throughout the exhibition, providing the basis for an open re-interpretation of its themes by both Korman and Lund, as they transcribe, translate, and edit the story into an installation that considers visual art’s slippery materiality through a more liquid movement from image to text and back.

_

Sam Korman was born in Buffalo, NY and has lived and worked in Portland, Marfa, New York and most recently St. Louis. He is currently the assistant director of White Flag Projects. Korman has contributed texts to ArtLies, BOMBlog, Pastelegram, and numerous books and exhibition catalogs. He was the founder and director of Car Hole Gallery, which operated between 2009-2010. The collected writings from Car Hole can be found in Notes From A Young Curator, published by Publication Studio. He is the co-editor and co-founder of YA5, a five-times annually produced journal that covers art, music, food, cinema, TV, and design.

Israel Lund was born in 1980 in Vermont and currently lives and works in New York City. He was educated at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers Univeristy, NJ (MFA) as well as Pacific Northwest College of Art, OR (BFA). Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Rob e rt s&T ilt on, Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA, Eleven Rivington, NYC, and Elaine Levy Project, Brussels, Belgium.







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Episode 8

ROBERT SUERMONDT
FACE OFF

Opening and book launch Saturday June 22, 2013, 5-9 pm
Exhibition until July 27 by appointment only

Middlemarch is very pleased to present its eighth exhibition, comprising of a series of recent collages by artist Robert Suermondt (born in 1961 in Geneva; lives and works in Brussels and The Hague).

The exhibition is accompanied by an Artist's book, available in a limited edition of 100 copies. It is printed on newsprint paper in a format closely approximating the size of the originals.

It is impossible to disassociate Suermondt's work from the rapport he has with images and photographs. Sometimes he produces these himself; often they are appropriated from newspapers and magazines. Initially archived, the images are later cut-out, turned around, covered up, erased, and combined in various ways. The images and the gestures that transform them, simultaneously constitute an index of the artist's oeuvre and a reservoir of forms and images that continuously feed the production of his tableaux.

At first glance, Suermondt's recent compositions appear to be stable and elaborately constructed images. Upon closer inspection, however, it is revealed that this stability is a decoy; fragmentary, cut-up, pierced, they undermine this initial unity, which in retrospect has proved to be an illusion of unity, a projection.

It so happens that the collages presented at Middlemarch provided the artist with a newfound possibility, that of limiting himself to the combinatorial arrangement of only two cut-out images. To Suermondt, these adverts, in the way they idealize the body through photography, already contain an uncanny dimension due to the fragmentation they seem to affect (cut-off shadows, contrast, framing...). "These adverts tend toward abstraction. Their contrasting effects offer cut lines between full and empty, between the shadow and light on the body and clothing: I saw fault lines that I could break, or could extend with other image ... "

The exhibition also features a recent tableau entitled Vento Box, combination of painting and collage, representing a new and as-yet unseen development in the artist's oeuvre.

Robert Suermondt was born in Geneva in 1961. He lives and works in Brussels and Den Haag. He won the Meret Oppenheim Prize in 2006 in Switzerland.

His work has been shown in places such as Stuk, Leuven, Remap 3 Biennial, Athens, Casino Luxembourg, Art Unlimited 39, Basel, Transit, Mechelen, Etablissement d'en face, Brussels, De Garage, Mechelen, Museum Dhondt Daenens, Deurle, De Singel, Antwerpen, Fabian & Claude Walter Gallery, Zurich, Annet Gellinck Gallery, Amsterdam, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Galerie Hussenot, Paris, Galerie Bruges-la-morte, Bruges.
He has a forthcoming duo exhibition with John Stezaker at the Centre de la Photographie in Geneva opening on September 2013.

www.robertsuermondt.com

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Episode 7

SPACE WHOLE KARAOKE

Ethan Cook, Ted Gahl, Parker Ito, Roman Liška, Larissa Lockshin,
Israel Lund, Landon Metz, David Ostrowski, John Roebas,
Travess Smalley and Kyle Thurman

Opening Saturday April 13, 2013, 5-9 pm
Exhibition until May 25 by appointment only

Karaoke is a form of interactive entertainment or video game in which amateur singers sing along with recorded music using a microphone and public address system. The music is typically a well-­known pop song minus the lead vocal. Lyrics are usually displayed on a video screen, along with a moving symbol, changing color, or music video images, to guide the singer.

John Roebas


Landon Metz


Ethan Cook


Israel Lund


Roman Liška


Kyle Thurman


Parker Ito


David Ostrowski


Travess Smalley


Ted Gahl


Larissa Lockshin



Ethan Cook, b. 1983 in Texas, lives and works in New York City. Cook most recently had his first European solo exhibition, Felman, at Galerie Jeanroch Dard in Paris. Upcoming exhibitions include a two-­person exhibition with Samuel Francois at Art Brussels, a group exhibition at Brand New Gallery in Milan as well as participation in this year's Venice Biennale.

Ted Gahl, b. 1983 in New Haven, CT, lives and works in Litchfield, CT. Gahl received a BFA from Pratt Institute in 2006 and a MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. He has recently shown at The Peninsula School in Portland, Maine, at Halsey Mckay in East Hampton and at Morgan Lehman in New York.

Parker Ito, b. 1986, lives and works in Los Angeles. Ito received his BFA from the California College of the Arts in 2010. He has exhibited in Los Angeles, Toronto and Copenhagen, and his work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Interview Magazine, and i-­D.

Roman Liška, b. 1980 in Hamburg, Germany is currently based in London. His current solo show Gemini is on view at Brand New Gallery, Milan, until May 11th. Upcoming solo shows include Brace, Brace! at IMO, Copenhagen, Denmark opening on May 3rd and DUVE Berlin in September 2013.

Larissa Lockshin, b. 1992 in Toronto Canada, lives and works in New York City. Lockshin is currently completing a BFA at Parsons the New School for Design in New York.

Israel Lund, b. 1980 in Vermont, lives and works in New York City. Israel has forthcoming solo exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton in Los Angeles and Eleven Rinvington in New York City, at Elaine Levy Project in Brussels, and a duo show with Sam Korman at Middlemarch in Brussels.

Landon Metz, b. 1985 in Phoenix, AZ, lives and works in New York City. Metz is an American artist working in painting and sculpture whose work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and in Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Canada and Mexico. Selected solo and group exhibitions include F(re)e Play, Stadium, New York, Varying Degrees of Absurdity, Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Galerie TORRI, Los Angeles, Still, Galerie TORRI, Paris, Can't Stop Rock, Lobster, Martos, New York, Historia Mysteria, Renwick, New York and Something To Dance To, Preteen Gallery, Mexico City.

David Ostrowski, b. 1981, lives and works in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Albert Oehlen. Recent solo exhibitions include F at Artothek in Cologne, 2013 and 'I'm OK.' Moments later, he was shot at Peres Projects in Berlin.

John Roebas, b. 1985 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Roebas holds a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. He has most recently exhibited at Bodega, Philadelphia, 2012 and Nudashank Gallery, Baltimore, 2013.

Travess Smalley, b. 1986 in West Virginia, is a New York City-­based artist whose work straddles the boundaries of digital and physical art making. His studio practice revolves around the digitalization and subsequent physical re-­fabrication of paintings, sculptures, and photographs. His processes and compositions speak the visual languages of modernism through materials both old and new.

Kyle Thurman, b. 1986 in West Chester, PA, lives and works in New York City. Thurman received his BFA from Columbia University in 2009 and was a guest student at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Germany, from 2011 to 2012. Previous exhibitions include West Street Gallery (New York), Shoot the Lobster (New York / Miami), and Office Baroque (Antwerp). Thurman has a forthcoming exhibition at Room East (New York).






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Episode 6

MARTIN MEERT
SOLEIL CITRON

Opening Saturday March 16, 2013, 5-9 pm
Exhibition until March 31, by appointment only

For its sixth iteration, Middlemarch presents the work of Martin Meert, an artist who until now has rarely exhibited in Brussels.

At 23 years old, Martin Meert impressively melds distinct references that are at once urban, specific to his generation, and classical, but nevertheless anchored in the tradition of Belgian and International modern painting.

Martin Meert seeks this clarity in paintings by Matisse; magnificently skilled until his death in the practice of collage, or perhaps by the Belgian painter Jean Brusselmans, whose characteristic style is currently experiencing a popular revival.

Seemingly without hierarchy, he combines drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, and installation - elements that are realised in synthesized movements, and through gestures that suggest efficiency and clarity. 

But Martin Meert also devours Manga; he digests the crucial importance of the line in delivering a glaring finish to a moment through the comic master Tezuka. Manga and comics teach the importance of narrative sequencing. In effect, if an individual grid of a comic appears irregular, or in some way weaker than the others, the entire layout of the story loses its richness.

The installation of his paintings thus becomes an essential concern for Martin Meert. Transposing the Manga logic of comic sequencing to his exhibition strategy, Martin Meert honors this reference by showing his works in/on boxes or structures he has built himself; gathered together in this way, “they become beautiful”.

Beyond the connections we weave through the works themselves and their ever-evolving solutions, each presentation offers, in the words of Calvin and Hobbes (who Martin Meert quotes freely), "good and less-good stories, but it does not matter, because it is dynamism that counts. "

Meanwhile, his drawings - among them the “beautiful, the ugly, the useless” - are united democratically. Their organization allows for the potential of unexpected discovery, for uncovering a new treasure out of the corner of one’s eye.

Martin Meert’s interest in skateboarding acts as pivotal final element in his work; it is from within this culture that he locates his sense of humour, challenge, music, and finally, instinct.

This instinct - a sense of urgency inherited and residually present from his adolescent period - is expressed freely even as it is confronted by academic references and research. In fact, it is this tension that allows him to transform raw energy without intimidation from the Masters - and into his own form of poetry.

“It’s a long long preparation for a few moments of innocence”, said Philip Guston. Like Sigmar Polke, Guston developed a gestural language which is to this day impactful on an entire generation of artists. Martin Meert’s allegiance to figuration and painterly tradition is kept in the balances by his close ties to urbanism and its inherent sensibility for vibrant and strong colours, at once fragmented and synthesized. Amidst this tension, Martin Meert detaches himself from the technical conventions of his mediums, in this way playfully exploring whether his work is in fact drawing, or painting.


Martin Meert, born 1989 in Brussels, lives and works in Brussels.






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Episode 5

YOEL PYTOWSKI
ME, MYSELF AND EVERYONE WE KNOW

Opening : Saturday December 8 , 2 - 8 pm
Exhibition until December 22, 2012, by appointment only

For its fifth edition Middlemarch gives a carte blanche to Benoit Platéus who decided to show a few works by young French-Israelian artist Yoel Pytowski's on wich he wrote an essay:

Yoel Pytowski's self-portraits as characters from popular films are montages. They result from a series of cuts and assemblages, combining materials of at least three different natures. First, there is the photograph taken on the movie set, showing an incredibly famous fictional hero. These are found on the Internet and drawn by the artist. As the resolution of the image often does not measure up to the depth of detail Pytowski wants to bring to his drawing, the artist will then Google the accessories he needs to enrich his rendering (Blondin's belt, Indiana Jones' gun holster, Conan the Barbarian's necklace, etc.). So Pytowski draws from photographs.

Once the body and decor are complete, then comes the face transplant: for its depiction to be detailed and realistic, Pytowski will trace the actor's facial structure (one can see the different shapes of the jaw from one self-portrait to the next), on top of which he inserts his own portrait, done in front of a mirror. Pytowski describes his installations as "chimneys" thus placing the drawings and their bases on an equal footing. His self- portraits are in fact bas-reliefs: the drawing is not hung on the wall, but is placed on a particular type of frame: not merely a frame, but also an archetypal chimney. The mechanism is completed by the choice of title, which refers not to the title of the film but to its filming location.

But on whom does he superpose his own face? On Luke Skywalker, the character? Or on Mark Hamill, the actor? Which fantasy is it? As these celebrities are forever tied to the heroes they portray, we are in the presence of three people in a single portrait; for the whole of the installation, 9 people in a single face.
Is this a multiplication or a fractioning of the self? Does Yoel Pytowski have one or several bodies? We should also emphasize the spectral nature of his self-portraits. Is Yoel Pytowski a ghost seeking a body to inhabit, whose incarnation relies on the long hours spent meticulously drawing?

During an interview, Yoel Pytowski insisted on the separation between the person and his fantasy, and we might add: between the stage and the wings, between the location of the story and the filming location, between the filmed and the drawn space, between the screen and the chimney, between the moving and still images, between color and black and white. Or again, between the slow execution of the drawing (about 100 hours) and the brevity of the photogram (1/24 second).

To summarize: four self-portraits, in the shape of archetypes from the cinema, referring both to the comedy or horror film. Four displaced self-portraits that navigate between the reality of the actor's life, the fiction of the character he interprets, fantasy, identification, projection, …

And this surprising paradox: it is the bodies of these characters that come to mask Yoel Pytowski's face.

Yoel Pytowski, born 1986 in Israel, lives and works in Brussels.

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Episode 4

BUNK EDITION

Claire Decet, Samuel François, Piotr Lakomy, Renato Leotta, Justin Morin

Bunk Edition exists since 2008 and is based in Hettange-Grande (France).
It realises books, catalogues and DIY artist's editions according to the opportunities. Bunk Edition also sets up meetings around books or around the work of artists they collaborate with.

For its fourth edition Middlemarch gives Bunk Edition carte blanche. Bunk Edition invited Claire Decet, Samuel François, Piotr Lakomy, Renato Leotta, and Justin Morin to exhibit in Brussels with a new collective edition. Most of the artists will present one or several art works referring to their individual publications that were edited by Bunk Edition.

Opening : Saturday October 6th , 2 - 8 pm
Exhibition until 20 October 2012, by appointment only

Justin Morin


Claire Decet


Piotr Lakomy


Claire Decet


Renato Leotta


Samuel François

Claire Decet lived in Berlin for two years where she collected plants and bunches of flowers. Like a fragile vision of nature, STILLEBEN (2011) archives this collection like a herbarium of dried flowers, arranged in vases and fortune bowls.

Upon his arrival in Berlin in 2009, Samuel François bought an analogue photo camera on the fleamarket of Mauerpark with which he took numerous photographs. When returning to France in 2011, he used these almost 500 pictures to partially publish them in a book of 360 pages : CLOSER (2012).

T-HOOD (2010) of Piotr Lakomy echoes a series of exhibitions with the same title. The 64 pages contain an inventory of activities in public spaces in Lazarz & Jezyce, Poznan (Poland) during 2009 and 2010.

For KLEIN CALVIN (2012) Justin Morin compiled Calvin Klein advertising images (from the last thirty years) that he reproduced in International Klein Blue, the blue colour created by artist Yves Klein. The frantic combination of stylistic (the minimal chic of the New York designer) and thematical obsessions (the exploration of the body via French anthropometrics) create hybrid images that are both fictional and graphical.

The last publication by Renato Leotta, ORLANDO, SALVATORE E CHRISTIAN (2012) questions the language codes that determine a frontier between Europe and the Mediterranean

Middlemarch shows all these publications together with a selection of works by these five artists.

Claire Decet, born 1978 in France, lives and works in Hettange-Grande (FR)
www.clairedecet.com

Samuel François, born 1977 in France, lives and works in Hettange-Grande (FR)
www.samuelfrançois.com

Piotr Lakomy, born 1983 in Poland, lives and works in Poznan (PL)
www.piotrlakomy.com

Renato Leotta, born 1982 in Italy, lives and works in Torino (IT)
http://rl-1982.blogspot.be

Justin Morin, born 1979 in France, lives and works in Paris (IT)
www.medica-menteuse.com

Bunk Edition, Hettange-Grande (FR)
www.bunkedition.fr





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Episode 3

SEE YOU THERE

LAUENEN RESIDENCY AND EDITIONS
Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, Éric Croes, David de Tscharner

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, éric Croes and David de Tscharner were together in (an unofficial and non-institutional) residency in Lauenen, Switzerland, in February 2012. The three artists stayed in this little village in a valley of the Berner Oberland : a huge contrast with Gstaad, capital of the international Jet Set, located only 15 minutes away. The decision to go to Lauenen came naturally because of the personal history of Swiss artist de Tscharner who often stayed in the chalet of his family, and because of Lauenen's train station… which was never taken into use because the railway tracks of the MOB (Montreux-Berner-Oberland) eventually stopped in Gstaad.

For its third project, Middlemarch invited the three artists to present in Brussels the works they created in Lauenen.

Opening : Saturday May 26th , 2 - 8 pm
Exhibition until 9 June 2012, by appointment only

Artists often stay in unofficial residency together, looking for both human and creative privileged moments. Without any doubt, the most famous residency is the one initiated by Cobra, from mid-August until mid-September 1949, during the Bregnerod encounters: 'The meeting officially began on 19 August in the evening, with a dinner for 19, comprising 8 men, 6 women, 5 children, 2 writers, 4 painters, 1 architect, 1 student of radio-electricity; 6 nationalities; 12,500 kilometres journeyed; 525 years.' Christian Dotremont also wrote: 'The congress has fun, cutting wood, drinking spirits, visits to surrounding areas (…), going to bathe, a hitch-hiking tour to the ends of earth, dreaming, sleeping, working, modelling lay, painting (me too, everyone), writing (me too), read a little, not go to the cinema, cutting wood, going to bathe, dream, sleep, read a little…'

In Lauenen as well, one might have counted the emptied bottles, every artist's own recipe, the nature hikes, the falls while skiing, the animated discussions… which accompanied the creation of about twenty collective art works and as many individual works. The connecting thread of this residency was watercolor painting as an imposed practice for these three artists with a completely different background and artistic practice. Even though some contingencies justified the choice of watercolor painting, in a village not far away from Gstaad watercolor painting ironically brings to mind the novelesque universe by Thomas Mann of a holiday atmosphere…

At Middlemarch the artists present a selection of their collective watercolor paintings. Like a game consisting in picking words ad random from a dictionary, everyone's practices come together and blend in such a way that one is no longer interested in which hand traced which brush stroke. The art works are close to 'art brut' : the experience becomes more important than the artistic act. The exhibition also shows the personal works the artists created during the same residency.

Watercolor painting is not unfamiliar to éric Croes who uses it to enhance the narrative, almost oniric character of his installations. In his work he creates collections of images reminding his main interests as a child (electrical trains, pandas, sportsmen, snowy mountains, …), that he then uses as themes in his often naïve or unsettling paintings. In Lauenen he mostly worked around dogs. The residency offered David de Tscharner the occasion to explore new links between image and sculpture in his work. The colored and abstract stains in watercolor painting mounted on socles remind his project One sculpture a day keeps the doctor away. During this one year experiment he daily presented one of his sculptures on the internet. This procedure rendered his (3D) sculptures in 'flat' 2 dimensions, while the watercolor paintings he created in Lauenen seem to be conceived the other way around : the colored stains seem constructed in 3 dimensions.

For Jean-Baptiste Bernadet watercolor painting is in every way the exact opposite of oil painting, the medium he almost exclusively works with. He experienced trying out watercolor painting as a restricting and economic way of working. He shows one of the sketch books he worked in while in Lauenen, illustrating in a way how exercise is more revealing than the result. He thus stays faithful to his interest to put the pictorial act into discourse.

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, born 1978 in France, éric Croes, born 1978 in Belgium, and David de Tscharner, born 1979 in Switzerland, all live and work in Brussels.

www.jbbernadet.com
www.ericcroes.be
www.david-de-tscharner.com





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Episode 2

CÉLINE CLÉRON

For its second exhibition, Middlemarch will present the French artist Céline Cléron's first solo show in Belgium.
A selection of works, gathered around approximately fifteen illustrated balloons, will be shown at Middlemarch. The latex balloons, tiny canvases on which Céline Cléron executes painstakingly detailed drawings, are later burst with a pin, which provokes a shocking change in scale of the object. This process points to a miniaturizing imagination, to borrow the words of Bachelard. Thus the balloons of our childhood serve as the basis for a traumatizing performance, whose only remnants are the rags presented here, witnesses of a brutally interrupted but glorious past.

Opening : Saturday January 28th , 2 - 8 pm
Exhibition until 11 February 2012, by appointment only

Céline Cléron's work stems from her interest in history, the past, encyclopedias and museums… — different sites where knowledge is developed — leading to a practice that hinges on the border between the sensory and the conceptual. Chance and accident play an important role in her work: nature itself often provides the finishing touches. By infiltrating a landscape or entrusting her works in progress to bees or goats, Cléron allows nature to contribute to the development of her work. Thus the subject actively participates in its own representation, combining shapes and senses in a single object.
To illustrate this process, a page from an encyclopedia creates a literal connection between the image of a ruffled collar (in French, "col ruché") and one of a bee's nest ("ruche"). Céline Cléron allows the toiling worker bees to construct the honeycomb of an old-fashion collar. Here too, chance plays a crucial role, as the result of the process is unpredictable, depending on the bees' labor.

Céline Cleron, born 1976 in France, lives and works in Paris.

www.celinecleron.com














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Episode 1

JEAN-BAPTISTE BERNADET, BENOIT PLATÉUS

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet and Benoit Platéus were together in residency in New York City from April to June 2011. Artworks made during their stay, along with those made by Bernadet during his residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, were showed in June 2011 at Karma, NYC, a bookstore, gallery and publisher.
An artist publication was also edited by Karma for this event.
For its first project, Middlemarch invited both artists to present in Brussels the exhibition and the publication they did in NYC.

Opening and Book Launch Saturday October 1st, 2-8 pm
Exhibition until 15 October 2011, by appointment only.

Download the artists interview (PDF):
english
french

Working by transfers, duplication, erasing, accumulation and exhaustion, the French painter and sculpture artist JEAN-BAPTISTE BERNADET aims to let the painting itself direct the process by which it is made. Each of his gestures are either acts of invention or destruction that build a tension between disillusion and hope, pessimism and faith, the taste for the unfinished and the desire of achievement, the will to be clear and the inclination to enigmas. Jean-Baptiste Bernadet describes his paintings as “remains” outliving his certitude of never achieving a masterpiece. The result is a rich, precious and complex surface of his paintings, a polymorphous and unstable body of work, perpetually reinvented, in pursuit by any means of an extreme intensity. There is a skepticism built in to his practice —a humorous dubiety and doubt— that sheds light on the impossibility of painting today in correlation to its necessity.

BENOIT PLATÉUS’s work doesn’t neglect any medium — photography, video, drawing or sculpture — in order to search for ambiguities in the most mundane field of visibility. Restless observer, precise, discrete and malicious, he introduces a distance between objects and their perception in order to shift them to the other side, in a space with variable dimensions and multiple interpretations. In this way his art often acts as a psychic apparatus that plays on, questions and reflects the viewer’s perception and consciousness.

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, born 1978 in France, and Benoit Platéus, born 1972 in Belgium, both lives and works in Brussels.