Valérie Bach Gallery

During Brussels Art Days – 11 to 13 September – Valérie Bach Gallery will open the season with a Christian Jaccard solo show. Since April 2012, the gallery has called 6 rue Faider home. This glass roof-vaulted location is now joined by the recently-renovated and reopened Old Royal Skating Rink – an industrial complex ranked in Brussels’ architectural heritage. The gallery continues to host artists living in Belgium as well as foreign contemporary, emerging or established talents, working within different mediums – such as sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, video and installation-based work.

“Franco-Swiss artist Christian Jaccard, employs a combustion process; he coined Brûlis and Concept Supranodal in 1990. Fire – the source of life and light – is interlaced within the principle of creation – the tools that constitute the practice of this artist for whom the stakes are the representation of time. Free from stretcher bars, the canvas is printed on by using what he calls tools: natural objects (plants and insects), paper, ribbon. From 1971 onward, he has used ropes, string and knots. These tools replace the paintbrush to produce traces on the canvas. Around 1973, he began a series of burned works. Initially, they were combustions on blank canvas. Then from 1979 to 1981, he started a series of burnings, of which the support is nothing other than anonymous paintings of previous centuries – portraits, religious scenes – or more recently, cinema advertisements. The combustion attacks certain parts of the image and leaves others increasingly visible. A stay in Italy in 1984, lead to the birth of: the emitted red (Le Rouge Emis), followed by, in 1989, by burnings (Brûlis) and of supranodal concept (Concept supranodal) that he develops during the 1990s. He was a Villa Kujuyama laureate in 1994. Since the 1990s, Jaccard has continued his investigations, touching upon the problematic of painting, following the fundamental choices he made at the end of the 1960s. Since 2000, he often works outdoors, in the industrial wilderness, where the problematic of the painting emancipates itself and the studio becomes an ephemeral laboratory. The exhibition at Valérie Bach Gallery will look at works from the 1990s up to the present, from burnings to concept supradonal. One must attempt to read in his burnings, the way one reads the lines of a hand, looking for destiny which is the sign of life within matter” (Pierre Restany : Christian Jaccard, La preuve du vrai par le feu. 1991).

Christian Jaccard’s first exhibition at Valérie Bach gallery will run during the Brussels Art Days – 11 to 13 September 2015.