Tony Oursler has taken Belgium by storm. “Glare Schematics,” at Galerie Albert Baronian, one of two impressive exhibitions recently on view in that country, was a crowded and outrageous mixture of works on paper and mixed-media sculpture, depicting happy people, devils, talking masks, and more. Among the sculptures were four wall-mounted, branching metal structures that evoke family trees—send-ups, maybe, of the seriousness of those who try to go back in time and rediscover their forefathers. In Oursler’s world, this is a perfect starting point for putting together sometimes absurd combinations of all kinds of found objects with archetypal yet fake family portraits. What to say of a combination of an eye-to-the-telescope photographic view of the cosmos, a remote control, a talking ethnic mask, and a seemingly mismatched “family,” such as we encounter in Cosmiconsanguinal (all works at this venue 2013)? And how should we make sense of Distant Relatives, in which a man (a father?) dressed up as a woman (a mother?) presents his two children, a toddler and a baby? In some of the family-tree sculptures, we recognize the same characters Oursler depicts in his works on paper, all created via the same technique of mixed media, paint, and collage. Here, the titles refer in an associative way to notions of family and ancestry—for instance, Related, Black Sheep, Nature Nurture, and Spitting Image (in which we encounter the family from Cosmiconsanguinal). According to Oursler, the atypical—possibly dysfunctional—family is the norm instead of the exception.

Diverse and totally different aspects of Oursler’s work were on display in “Phantasmagoria,” at MAC’s Grand-Hornu (Musée des Arts Contemporains de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles—Grand-Hornu), a museum on a former coal-mining site near the French border. The show presented two new installations along with a sampling of earlier works, among them his collaboration with the late Mike Kelley, White Trash / Phobic (featuring Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler), 1992. Fuck you, 1994, with its image of a trapped head under a mattress cursing and declaiming in an abysmal tone such profanities as “Hey fuck you shithead ya fucking scumbag go to hell,” remains as poignant as it is troubling in its evocation of the nightmare of obsessive fear and loathing. The recent large-scale installation Phantasmagoria, 2013, which Oursler produced for the show at MAC’s Grand-Hornu and in which the visitor walked through giant talking masks and huge projections, which looked almost like an amusement park of obsessions, embodies today the same disturbing power that Fuck you delivered two decades ago. Oursler remains one of the sharpest anatomists of our contemporary paranoia, whether on the intimate level of the family or as grand public spectacle.

—Jos Van den Bergh