Dynamics of Sources at Feizi Gallery

During Brussels Art Days – 11 to 13 September – Feizi will open the season with “Dynamics of Sources” by the contemporary artists Raphaël Denis and Chen Yujun. For his first exhibition in Belgium, Raphaël Denis draws on art history of imaginary matter and fragmentary reconstitution, a fingerprint dynamic memory.

The French Raphaël Denis has always taken care to vary his artistic practices, recognizing the subtle shifts in thought and nuance which occur with a change of medium. Memory and the cults which nourish it as well as the passage of time are successively evoked in video and photography, calling attention to economic exchange and the throes of the art market through the production of multiples, user manuals and installations which push to absurdity the celebration of consumption. Despite the extreme diversity of subjects, materials and appearances of these works, a quasi-obsessive concern for detail and an ironic poetry always arise, becoming apparent within titles which waver between the absurdly aggressive and the evocatively incongruous. This final apposition between title and work, operating like an act of appropriation, marks the artist’s mastery over his object, called to join a facetious and jesting world, with a touching or ridiculous charm, in which different cults of the 19thcentury collide – the Wild West and industrial society, the triumph of the bourgeoisie and cultural consumption – forming absurd associations by the whim of formal and conceptual resonances

The Chinese artist Yujun explores the creative possibilities of a tiled floor and three walls, using various patterns of line and colour to render this universal domestic “set” bizarre and alien. In Asian Circumscription 5.2 Square Metres No. 1 (2008), a window—or is it a painting?—is papered over; a compass—or is it a random pattern?—sits in the centre of the floor.  Corners look like openings; walls start flat at the bottom but curve at the top like pillars.  A similar room in the three-panel painting Asian Circumscription 1111 (2011) has a mysteriously missing tile and an empty armchair; lines from its wallpaper extend right through a hole in the floor.  The artist and his migratory extended family all live in various parts of what is commonly labelled Asia, which Westerners often vaguely lump together with China.  For the artist, however, each of these “Asian areas” is distinctive, strange and filled with potential.

Until 7 November 2015 at Feizi.