ART CITIES:Brussels lsIda Tursic & Wilfried Mille

Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille began collaborating in 2000, the start of a new Millennium marked by a near-constant deluge of photographic images and technological, social, and political upheavals that seem to occur at a perpetually accelerating pace. From the very beginning, they have deliberately sought to simultaneously embrace and critically understand what place their primary medium of painting can occupy in such circumstances, wielding it like a weapon to place an ancient and versatile pictorial technology at the forefront of a dynamic practice.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery

“Are Men Unicorns?” is the title of the new exhibition by Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille at Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels. Since their meeting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon and the beginning of their common work in the early 2000s, the figurative paintings of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille question the fantasy and reality, the visible and its representation. Their large canvases “recycle” images found in magazines and the enormous data pool of the internet, anonymous pictorial material is being transformed into the traditional domain of painting. Obscene pornography, film scenes of burning houses, landscapes as well as mere abstract and geometrical elements – the subjects depicted illustrate the common overload of image production circulating through present media. Often alienated by overlapping layers of paint or interrupted by various patterns these paintings deal with the manipulation, re-utilisation and disappearance of images. These are recomposed by computer and repainted with oil or watercolor. The four-handed work as they practice it is as old as the history of art, however one always tries to identify the part of the one and the other. But to the question of who does what? The duo is content to indicate that each piece is the object of a double intervention. The two artists represent scenes of glamor, pornography, fashion, luxury and death. They paint their contemporary reality. The work of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille expresses a deep engagement with today’s forms of image representation.  Many have written about Tursic & Mille’s use of images found on the internet as fodder for their voracious imagination and as a base to build their pictures upon, their seemingly haphazard selection ranging from porn stars to random celebrity pictures, as if the formal qualities of their work had to yield to the very contemporary and mistaken tyranny of content or subject matter as the primary point of art making. Much less has been written about the wide range of painterly techniques they use to pursue their idiosyncratic and ambitious path, to accomplish their project of making artworks that simultaneously remain current and relevant to contemporary culture yet are consciously inscribed within the grand historical narrative of Western painting.

Info: Almine Rech Gallery, Abdijstraat 20 Rue de l’Abbaye, Brussels, Duration: 25/10-21/12/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com