BETWEEN HOME AND FAR
PASCAl DEMEESTER
APRIL 29TH – 6:00-10:00
On view until May 7Th by appointment.
Text by Hélène Fresnel
Art Critic
What is the common point between a black and white photo, a red wax model of a shelter and a vivid color gouache?
Their driving force: the quest of a shelter constantly being reinvented.
From photography to painting, through drawing and land art, the shelter has different aspects as it does not always explicitly appear in the referential form.
Sometimes the forest serves as a possible shelter and sometimes it is the primary place where they are built. Sometimes, the virgin canvas becomes the painting’s base in which the small cells are dotted around in the confine of the flat tint.
Traveling between Pascal Demeester’s artwork means to step into geography and an intimate story. These stories revolve around shelters like countries discovered during a passionate artistic and existential quest. They could be figurative or abstract, external or internal, monochromic or colored.
Photography in black and white is their genesis. Through a meticulous work of framing where branches are used as windows on the world, it reveals three key aspects of the artist’s quest:
The search of nature outside of the urban hypermodernity (a tribute to the forest’s beauty , appreciation of wood as an artistic base material)
The questioning of the origin of mankind (the first inhabitants, the birth of humans)
The quest for a natural and feminine refuge similar to the woman’s womb)
Relationships are being created between the artwork, metaphorical connections which support the coherence of the work. Dark and circulars branches connote a uterine cavity, the use of red to design the interior of a shelter or to paint a gouache, sending us back into ourselves and extending the organic metaphor.
“Athanor”, which is the artist’s latest series is a leap towards abstraction. We see a rotation of black flat tint (a reminder of dark forests in photography) and red (perhaps as red as our blood cells) with oval and round shapes. Like Alexander Calder, the game of colors, often primary, seems a quest for the essential.
The last drawing of the series, an obvious plastic beauty, goes further than the other ones in the artist’s process. For the first time, forms (egg cell?) are escaping from their container.
Towards which horizon, for what new birth?
Let us allow ourselves to dream of it.