SAMBANO TRABAJOSI
SAMBASI TRABAJONO
January 27 to February 12, 2024
Open studio
CDMX, Mexico
with Sébastien Capouet and Madeline Jimenez Santil.
To celebrate, we want to share and put in dialogue what we are working on at the moment. The exhibition, conceived as an open studio, will be built from an archive of working photos.
Therefore, the selection of works and the methods of exhibition will be based on the palimpsest of our frequentation and the intimacy of the space.
Fables Paniques
April 22 to May 21, 2023
Ada Ventura
Brussels, Belgium
with Francesco Battistello, Victoria Palacios and Mathis Pettenati.
The exhibition presents visual parables that questions the absurdity of existence. We find the humour that characterises surrealism, the spiritual depth that Jodorowsky embodies and an irreverent theatricality. Between marginal anti-heroes, burlesque codes, costumes and folklore, the exhibition Fables Paniques brings together with derision and strangeness paintings and sculptures in a garage.
Photos: Alice Pallot
Zindering
February 18 to April 16 2023
Emergent
Veurne, Belgium
with Marcel Berlanger, Jan de Nys, Victoria Palacios and Guy Wouete.
With his imposing painting Imperium, Benjamin Installé evokes a reign in decline. The painting starts from the setting up - or rather the dismantling - of an exhibition, but the image makes us think at the same time of the collapse of an empire. Is it the West that is crumbling before our eyes? Victoria Palacios represents a colourful world of harlequins and circus acts. But underneath this gaiety lies a world full of anguish and mystery. The artist does not only use the classic canvas; she also paints on cheap materials such as bread, second-hand books and even "Crocs" clogs. Jan De Nys - the eldest of the group - works with found images and torn down posters to which he gives a new life, a new face. In a surreptitious way, he introduces the roughness of the street into the exhibition space, with a touch of rebellion. Guy Woueté often dwells in his art on labor and rebellion. He examines the alienation to which work can lead - as Marx denounced a century and a half ago - and sees similarities between the expansionism of multinational corporations and the exploitation of the colonial era.
If the work of the artists exhibited reflects - consciously or not - the time of the moment, it also goes further by its original formal language, its thematic choices and its aesthetic formulations. This is particularly true of Marcel Berlanger's paintings, which have something timeless but at the same time idiosyncratic about them, owing to their unconventional support: a fiberglass panel that creates a surprising spatial effect. The work was executed in an almost mechanical manner and the pictorial gesture was deliberately banished. But in these paintings of plants, sunflowers and polar ice caps, the climate in which we live in is again insinuated, almost carelessly, - while being transcended, as it should be in a polysemic art.
Sam Steverlynck
Photos: Chantal Van Rijt
Closer
April 28 to May 29, 2022
Gevaert Editions
Brussels, Belgium
with Daniel Dariel and Elise De Maio.
The drawings were created in summer 2019 in a span of two weeks in my former apartment. They represented views of my home as seen from my bed, my couch or my kitchen table, populated by fantoms whose presence was made discernable by the hint of their scant actions such as drinking and smoking, reading, checking their phones or playing cards. I drew them as benevolent alter-egos that embodied what I aspired to back then: an ability to enjoy some kind of cheerful, nonchalant retirement.
The linocuts re-enacted years later these intimate drawings in a cathartic manner. Change of scale and medium implied new compositions, a different approach to expressivity with the use of carved lines and black color and a singular experience of self- estrangement percieved while carving patiently fresh images out of traces of a passed personal era.
Photos: Isabelle Arthuis
Imperium
March 25 to April 25, 2021
Le Botanique, Centre Culturel de la Communauté Française de Bruxelles
Brussels, Belgium
The painting represented a quite undefined, neither interior or exterior space which could have been all together a construction site, the building-up of an exhibition or a theatrical decor hastily deserted by its protagonists at the end of the representation due to a sudden disaster or because of general hangover.
Influenced by Spinozian concept of «Imperium» pursued in an eponymous essay by philosopher and researcher Frédéric Lordon, the aim of this pictural project was to materialise in visible form hidden collective forces of passion laying out a specific societal situation, i.e an art institution under constant renovation, located in a city area daily crossed by precarious, anonymous workers.
Photos: Fabrice Schneider
Providência
April 21 to May 27, 2018
BPS22, Musée d’art de la Province de Hainaut
Charleroi, Belgium
Out of this double encounter, I conceived the show as both a tribute to the architect’s work and a rendition of the peculiar social group I found myself immersed in for a short time. In this sense, I re-interpreted two of the architect’s buildings I daily frequented: the California building where I had my studio, and the Eiffelbuilding where I was generously hosted.
First artwork was a large painting scaled to the bay window of the Eiffel flat I lived in. It represented a clear, transparent interior room in which fantoms smoke, chat, read or danse, in a general atmosphere of idleness and stagnation. Objects are depicted moving by themselves in the air, inspired by the first filmic experiences of Hans Richter (Ghost Before Breakfast) and by Jasper Johns’s paintings from the eighties (Racing Thoughts).
Second artwork was constructed as a full scale model of the California balcony, turning it into a sculptural object studying elementary formal principles of sculpture, painting and architecture in a modernist spirit, by affixing painted cardboard panels onto a steel structure.
Photos: Fabrice Schneider
Chorus of Cold People
November 24, 2017
Swallowing Helmets
Brussels, Belgium
with Gaillard&Claude, Nicholas Goudket, Benjamin Installé, Maxime Le Bon, Juan Pablo Plazas, Stephanie Quirola, Cyriaque Villemaux, Danielle Brognon, Hélène Clerc-Denizot, Olivia Degrez, Sylvie Eyberg, Rameau Geronnez, Diego Thielemans
Photos: Fabrice Schneider
Tiger Juice
April 23 to May 20, 2017
Cissiste International
Brussels, Belgium
with Valérie Mannaerts.
The sculptures were made of stainless steel and incorporated metaphorical operations for studio practice such as pressure, tension, inclusion, connection. The painted volumes fitted into the steel structures and were painted using various techniques on every facet, mostly inspired by French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix’s representations of lions and tiger.
Sgraffito
May 14 to May 22, 2016
WIELS Project Room
Brussels, Belgium
– Marcel Schwob, The Children’s Crusade (trans. Henry Copley Greene), 1905.