Novelty LTD at La Verrière

“Quietly, over a number of years, Brussels – like Berlin before it – has established itself as a favoured destination for artists and other art professionals from across Europe and beyond: people for whom the city offers a fertile context for work on a different timescale, drawing on different impulses, all of which has contributed to the city’s fascinating, hybrid contemporary art scene,” writes curator Guillaume Désanges in the catalogue of Novelty LTD.

Désanges offers this geographic context to explain why she invited two artists with such seemingly different work – British painter, sculptor and video artist Douglas Eynon and Breton sculptor, video- and photographer, and textile artist Erwan Mahéo – to collaborate on the Novelty LTD exhibition atLa Verrière gallery. Simply put, they both live in Brussels and there’s something about these conditions of the city that is captured in the form and content of their work.

The result is remarkably architectural, transforming the La Verrière gallery of the Hermes Foundation spatially. Splitting the space is a large textile work with the plan of the gallery embroidered by Mahéo. Through a tunnel on the other side, Eynon’s Cloudforms is a surreal house of mirrors that creates a striking counterpoint to Mahéo’s erudite geometry.

“I have invited the two artists together because Douglas Eynon’s practice is poetic, while Erwan Mahéo’s programme is ballistic. But also because Erwan Mahéo is poetic in his de-realisation of the world, and because Douglas Eynon is ballistic in his capacity to touch the heart without words,” explains Désanges.