ISA D'HONDT. PAUL GEES. LAURE FORÊT. ARJAN JANSSEN.: INNER NATURE I

2 July - 15 August 2017

Within her art, Isa D’Hondt (Belgium) displays a consistent theme in her paintings through which she expresses her interpretation and impressions of buildings and spaces. She combines her photographic eye for detail with an abstract feeling for painting, whereby they are sometimes open and reflect light, another time dark and confined. Observing architecture, then refining the image is in fact the prominent feature guiding the artistic process of Isa D'Hondt. Based mainly on her own collection of images, she creates a world devoid of all superfluous details and reveals the essentials, to reduce it to its purest essence.

Since the 1980s, the installations of Paul Gees (Belgium) have been highly rated in the Belgian art world. The relationship between nature and culture is central to his work. A duality which he distinguishes in sophisticated large and small installations in which balance and tension are the main determining factors. The materials he uses to create this effect are transformed from their original structural and physical features. Steal obtains a constructive and space-descriptive meaning, wood is employed as a natural and dynamic component, stone represents weight as well as an unpredictable entity.

Laure Forêt (France) is fascinated by human nature and deconstructs the line of the body by means of drawings, collages, installations with embroidery or glass. For her it is a way of interacting with a line as a shape and a line as a boundary between an interior and an exterior. The pencil line, the embroidered line, the line cut out of paper or moulded in glass, leaves open the choice as to whether the resulting space demarcates an interior or an exterior. The emptiness in between seems to appear as a cut out in an abstract shape, and the interior and exterior disappear in almost total transparency whereby the shape is sensed, the skin acts as an elastic membrane.

Arjan Janssen (Netherlands), already well-known in the Netherlands, creates in his drawings and paintings a potential universe. In the same way that the principle of the hydrogen atom underlies the matter of our cosmos, in his oeuvre a number of delineations are always fixed in the construction of his art. The linear or abstract image is first materialised on canvas or paper and the use of paint comes afterwards. In fact, his art is not the imagination of a specific rhythm, but it is this precise rhythm itself. The most important motive is that contained in the subtle difference between being and becoming, between the eternal and the temporary.