PRESENTATION: Beyond the Lines

The exhibition “Beyond the Lines” features the works and research of artists who were Residents at the Villa Empain and whose preferred practice involves the line and drawing. This exhibition celebrates the ancestral technique of drawing, which has played a pivotal role for artists, craftsmen, and architects alike, and remains indispensable today. The exploration of forms, colours, and their endless variations, while eschewing systematism, lies at the core of the body of work on display.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Boghossian Foundation Archive

Whether inspired by landscape or geometry, free or repetitive, the participating artists of the exhibition “Beyond the Lines” investigate the myriad applications, scales, and experiences of drawing, which they then present framed, placed on a plinth, suspended, or even created directly on the wall. Figurative, abstract, or at the intersection of genres, the practices featured here all create depth while playing on the monumentality of the drawing itself. In turn, the pieces reveal the underlying mechanisms of the line, which can represent the contours of the visible or, conversely, trace an invisible architecture. The artists have been closely involved in presenting their pieces in their respective spaces. Romain Ruiz-Pacouret and Rébecca Konforti created an in-situ work for the project in the form of a mural. Ulla Hase is mainly known for her pen drawings. Ulla is interested in questions of physical and intellectual knowledge. She creates interfaces by modelling both the temporal and the spatial aspect of her subjects. Her perception of the real and mediated environment condenses into large-format pen drawings. It is a contemplative and sculptural work that underlines the artist’s personal realm of experience, parallel to the digital flow of images and information. Alaa Itani studied Fine Arts at the Lebanese University and Communication Arts at the American University of Sciences and Technology in Beirut. He is the winner of the Lebanon Visual Art Prize of the Boghossian Foundation in 2022. His work has consistently orbited around creative expressions linked with Islam, exploring both its practice and perception. With his work focusing on pictorial practices, he has lately turned his attention to the concept of “l’art pour l’art” the visual communication at its most elemental essence. Rébecca Konforti’s preferred mediums are mural painting, painting on supports, drawing, engraving, and writing, with which she sometimes produces installations. She imagines the world as a constellation of spaces in relation to one another. To question our gaze, she creates immersive installations using architectural “trompe-l’oeil”, image montage, and pictorial language. She uses the same principles of space entanglement in her mural paintings as in her drawings. Her site-specific work, realized with Romain Ruiz-Pacouret, is inspired by the immediate context and is accompanied by autonomous works inspired by her concerns, travels, or imagination. Marine Pagès graduated in 2002 from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She teaches drawing at an academy of the arts. Since 2009, she has co-directed Roven éditions with Johana Carrier. Her drawings on paper and in volume move back and forth between these two practices, constructing fragile structures in the space (sheet, architecture) derived from memories of frames or bodies. She works with a minimal vocabulary of forms in which the line is a recurring motif. Romain Ruiz-Pacouret’s two preferred mediums are painting and drawing, which enable him to explore unique perspectives on landscapes. His drawings revolve around a reflection on architecture and the forms it produces. To create them, he draws from art history and his imagination. Thus, he juxtaposes, on a landscape traversed in a dream, the systematism and rigor of the geometric constructions of the Italian or German Renaissance with vegetative forms from medieval manuscripts. He works on the walls of the Project Space in the Villa Empain, according to a protocol developed with Rébecca Konforti. Julien Saudubray graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2012 in the studio of François Boisrond. After experimenting with what he calls the mobility of painting and its multiple applications, he synthesizes his experiments into a practice he defines as mechanistic. Allowing the traces and errors that compose its architecture to appear, drawing constitutes an autonomous practice within his pictorial work. Amélie Scotta graduated from ENSAV La Cambre (Brussels) in Art and from the Haute école des Arts du Rhin (Strasbourg) in Design. Her research is built around questions related to urban planning and housing. In her work, the construction – both of the drawing and of the buildings that are its subjects – play an essential role, mixing digital tools and manual techniques. From the Jeddah Tower to the abandoned factories of Roubaix, and from the Rio stadium to the medieval recluses, and Brussels scaffolding, Amélie Scotta intuitively questions architecture in all of its forms. Brendan Sullivan Shea is a designer, researcher, and teacher working through a spectrum of mediums from algorithms and architecture to buildings, from code and craft to data and drawings. His creative practice explores new technologies and strategies of visual representation, often incorporating analysis of architectural precedents and environmental phenomena as a foundational step in the production of new computationally-assisted works. Intersecting tradition and technology, Brendan’s work observes the rhythms and repetitions of computational process and investigates the meticulous merging of medium and machine. Younès Zarhoni is a sound and visual artist, born in Antwerp of Moroccan descent. His work explores the crossroads of audio and visual art, focusing on conceptions of national, religious and artistic identity by means of electronic music performances, sound installations and visual work. Younès’ work is impregnated with elements of a contemporary folklore on the one hand and urban Maghrebian diasporic history on the other. From these associations he tries to dissect narratives, myths, and reconstruct them visually, sonically and poetically.

Participating Artists:  Ulla Hase, Alaa Itani, Rébecca Konforti, Romain Ruiz-Pacouret, Marine Pagès, Julien Saudubray, Amélie Scotta, Brendan Sullivan Shea, Younes Zarhoni

Photo left: Ulla Hase, Multiple silences, 2023, Rollerpen on paper, © Ulla Hase, Courtesy the artist and Boghossian Foundation. Photo right: Younes Zarhoni, What do we see when we see black // WDWSWWSB, 2023, Colored pencils, pastels and ink on paper, © Younes Zarhoni, Courtesy the artist and Boghossian Foundation

Info: Curator: Louma Salamé, Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Avenue Franklin Rooseveltlaan 67, Brussel, Belgium, Duration: 28/6-3/11/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://villaempain.com/