Walter Swennen in
Spektrum
15 May—27 July 2024
Group exhibition at Fondation D'Enterprise Hermès, La Verrière, Brussels, Belgium
In Brussels, beneath the zenithal skylight of La Verrière, curator Joël Riff has sought to present the work of individual artists through plural configurations that he refers to as "extended solos". Since 2023, by inviting several creators from different backgrounds to come together in dialogue around the work of a single artist, he enables the public to enrich their perception of the artist’s oeuvre while at the same time coming to understand it by way of a fertile interplay of correspondences.
Emmanuelle Castellan, who was born in 1976 in Aurillac in the centre of France, works on the surface of her paintings in all their depth. She superimposes layers, separates them out, covers them up and then digs through them, sometimes going as far as slicing through the surface of the canvas itself. With these “cuts”, as the artist calls them, the third dimension surfaces in the heart of the canvas, allowing other perspectives to emerge. Entitled Spektrum, the exhibition plays upon this polysemy, which is also present in the forms and silhouettes that inhabit the paintings even as their contours seem to refuse all definite form. To accompany the paintings of Emmanuelle Castellan, who today lives and works in Berlin, the curator has brought together five other creators – Johannes Nagel, Dagobert Peche, Muriel Pic, Norbert Schwontkowski and Walter Swennen – beneath the skylight of La Verrière who share the artist’s German tropism and whose respective explorations – through painting, ceramics, decorative arts and writing – add further breadth to the spectrum of her work.