Yoann Van Parys

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  picks July 24, 2022

  Charbel-joseph H. Boutros

  The exhibition “Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Untitled until now” offers a self-portrait of the Lebanese artist as pieced together through four works. For Life variation #3, the marbles, the ring and the continents (all works 2022), Boutros inserted fragments of a single gold ring—his own wedding ring—into five large marble slabs, each from a different country where the artist has lived. Alongside the other elements, Boutros lists “displacement,” “love,” and “hopes,” as part of the work, suggesting the end of a marriage as just another possible “variation” of one's personal timeline. A portrait,

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  print January/February 2021

  “Monoculture: A Recent History”

  It is somewhat ironic to have to speak in brief about the prodigious new exhibition “Monoculture: A Recent History,” organized by M HKA associate director Nav Haq. One could see the show as a reflection on the simplification society—simplistic society, even—in which we now live, an era where rash judgments reign. It is as if there were a systemic resistance to grasping the world’s complexity, even though we’ve never had such a clear image of it. The exhibition suggests that our current reality, far from being holistic, is structured by various factions of thought. Each is entrenched in its

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  picks October 19, 2020

  Honoré d’O

  The Belgian Conceptual artist Honoré d’O spent the first few months of the coronavirus lockdown in a twelfth-century Romanesque church in Ghent, where, through multiple interrelated interventions inspired by the furniture and historical artworks collected there over the past eight centuries, he eventually created a single large installation. His works, sited throughout the church and its radiating chapels, borrow symbolism from Jan van Eyck, whose famous altarpiece graces the city’s Saint Bavo’s Cathedral.

  Tafel van Eyck (Van Eyck Table, all works 2020) is a mimetic reproduction of two shipping

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  picks December 06, 2019

  Sophie Nys

  Much of Sophie Nys’s work deals with the relationship between domestic and political space; her practice is often associated with a Germanic literary imaginary that, though slightly out-of-date, she uses as a tool to comment on contemporary life. Nys focuses, in particular, on the metaphysic and folkloric sides of said imaginary, exploring the positions that both the bourgeois and the intellectual may occupy in time of crisis. Her current exhibition, “Etui of the private individual,” is a rigorous reflection on political lethargy no less relevant to the collective than to the individual.

  In her

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  picks September 23, 2019

  Paul Thek

  In 1989, twenty-eight copper plates that Paul Thek had etched with drawings and writings were discovered by the gallerist Ted Bonin and assistant Dennis Redmond in a New York City storeroom. Only a few prints were made during the artist’s life, which was cut tragically short by AIDS the year before. This exhibition presents a set of prints created, in 1992, from those plates, which themselves date to 1975. His earliest engravings, comet-strewn nightscapes with phrases such as “COMING OUT OF THE HILLS, AMERICAN PICASSOS, OR BUST,” were mistakenly prepared by Thek to print their exclamations

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  picks July 03, 2019

  Will Benedict

  Will Benedict’s exhibition “A Womb with a View” proposes an ontology of the contemporary image. This ontology—whether inkjet-printed, as in Aspirin Falls, 2015, or painted in gouache and layered with foamcore, as in Vein of Trolls, 2017—totters about, wary of its foundations. Benedict’s images, despite their pitiful attempts, never manage to gain independence (fitting for this particular gallery). The dots in the ironic Black Polka Dots and Ocher Polka Dots, both 2019, are in the style of Damien Hirst. The only differences between the pair are the distribution and color of the spots. Both

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  picks February 25, 2019

  Jacqueline Mesmaeker

  Jacqueline Mesmaeker’s exhibition works well in the back room of Hermès’s Brussels outpost, not only because of the Belgian artist’s beginnings as a stylist but also because the venue offers her an opportunity to engage the French imaginary as well as the fashion house itself. Mesmaeker has drawn on this imaginary elsewhere (in relation to writers such as Valery Larbaud, Denis Diderot, and François-René de Chateaubriand), and La Verrière is, of course, filled with an air of luxury—something else the artist scrutinizes as she suffuses the space with her characteristic mischief. In a gold frame

• print December 2010

  Manuel Graf

  German artist Manuel Graf’s exhibition “Mediterraneo” (Mediterranean) opened with its invitation card, which lay upon a table and revealed an image similar to an illustration from an archaeological exhibition catalogue—that is to say, showing a series of artifacts and isolated documents against a black background. The card gave the exhibition title in several languages: Italian (Mediterraneo), Greek ( ), Turkish (Akdeniz), and Arabic ( ). This title designated the show as a single overall installation: a work from 2010 conceived of for the space. Having noticed this invitation with its ecumenical,

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  print November 2010

  Philippe Van Snick

  Although providing an overview of Philippe Van Snick’s practice, this survey of the Belgian abstractionist’s oeuvre at the new and remarkable M-Museum was modest, taking up only five rooms. In the first gallery, one found a reconstruction of Dag//Nacht (Day//Night), 1986, an installation composed of one black square and one blue square facing each other on the walls of a narrow corridor, paired with two geometric monoliths made of wood and glass painted the same colors and facing each other in a similar way. The exhibition was not chronologically arranged—the same space contained (0-9) Stoel (

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  picks May 26, 2010

  Angel Vergara Santiago

  The enigmatically titled “Monday: Firework; Tuesday: Illuminations; Wednesday: Revolution” is a surprising exhibition, comprising a wide-ranging installation by Spanish-born Belgian artist Angel Vergara Santiago. The work on view includes a copy of a fake newspaper, six paintings (vintage lithographs printed on canvas and reworked with oil paint), two display cases containing historical documents and objects, a rug with black-and-white text imprinted on it (reminiscent of Marcel Broodthaers), and seven videos projected on screens suspended in the exhibition space. The videos superimpose excerpts

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  print February 2010

  Benjamin Verdonck

  The Belgian artist Benjamin Verdonck is best known for multidisciplinary projects in theaters, but in recent years he has also entered the stage of the visual arts, with performances as well as presentations in the context of exhibitions. Recently, under the title “On the Way to Work,” Verdonck featured a group of his visual art projects, all attesting to the transitions he effects between stage and gallery, action and object.

  This passage from gesture to material was made evident even in the exhibition’s title, which immediately suggested that the artist’s project resides in a creative process

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  picks October 27, 2009

  Ann Veronica Janssens

  Following solo exhibitions by noted international artists such as Mike Kelley, Yayoi Kusama, and Dan Perjovschi, it now seems that the two-and-a-half-year-old art center in Wiels, Belgium, will focus on a series of shows devoted to the country’s most distinguished contemporary artists. Several months ago, recent works by Luc Tuymans were on display. This time, it’s Ann Veronica Janssens’s turn; her exhibition will be followed by retrospectives of Francis Alÿs and Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Although Tuymans’s exhibit was somewhat disappointing, Janssens’s is an undeniable success.

  Known for multimedia