ART CITIES:Bruxelles-Da & Da
At the age of 7 to 12 months, the babies babbling, begins to sound more like words. At about 9 months, a baby start to understand gestures, pointing and grunting to indicate her wants. At about 10 months, gains more control and begin combining sounds. The first word often appears around 12 months, a common first word is, when points at something is “da”.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galeria MLF|Marie-Laure Fleisch Archive
When repetition is translated into tautology, and Dada is formulated as Da & Da, we seem to try to impose some order as we state the same thing twice, hinting at an explicit state of Da, some logical proposition. Da is just That, and That could be anything. In relation to the statement of Hugo Ball, Da & Da remains an opportunity for perception and criticism, but allows art to be, in the end, in itself. The exhibition “Da & Da” at the Galeria MLF|Marie-Laure Fleisch brings together five artists who have actively been engaging in the reiterative gesture as described above through their work. Dada, but resisting Dada with utter precision. Nikolaas Demoen uses images, drawings and film installations to create a guide to the story of the artist in art history: fame and decay, glory and destruction. Ever poetic, with tragicomic lightness, his installations are memorials to what could be described as the struggle for objective epistemology in the arts. The work of Vincent de Roder could be described as a continuous study of the line. Horizontal, vertical or oblique. Fat lines evolve into blocks, then into thin lines, before they disappear, lines cut. His work illustrates “nothing and allows the viewer to perceive the many things with which we fill nothingness, when we encounter it. The sculptures of Stefaan Dheedene often seem to echo the rational, functional ethos of modernism, as well as today’s ubiquity of modern consumerist design. His approach, perverts the parameters related to function, creating (semi-)autonomous objects, hovering between the realms of sculpture and commodity. Jonathan Michels’ various series of charcoal drawings repeat existing images, and through the artist’s choice of images, his virtuosity, and the sheer labor involved, they teeter between content and narrative, between original and copy, between spirit and labor, between value and value. For Adriaan Verwée, time, space and the object therein are building blocks that he stacks, changes, removes and returns. As a result his work seems to be at the same time finished and unfinished; present and absent; construction and image. He describes his photographic works as “side notes for the sculptural pieces and functioning as a sort of aide-mémoire”, adding another reiterative layer that he may further expand with explicit but mysterious titling.
Info: Curator: Luc Derycke, Galeria MLF|Marie-Laure Fleisch, 13 Rue Saint-Georges, Bruxelles, Duration: 12/1-24/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.galleriamlf.com
