Jørgen Missotten is a Belgian artist with a strong fascination for the surface of light. Both his painting series Clouds and Peeling Light frames the view of the audience on perfectly abstract monochromes in which the reflection of light symbolises the mirroring of the inner self. Provoking introversion, Missotten himself works in complete solitude from his home outside the city of Brussels with a framed view on the greenery of the local nature.
Missotten started off as a sculptor with a strong affection for raw materials such as black marble. His sculptures, meandering between design and art, gained international acclaim and consisted of meticulously polished surfaces that would reflect the light so adamantly that the three-dimensional stance of the material would disappear, reducing the marble into a two-dimensional surface. In recent years he translated this light-effect onto the canvas; painting being the blueprint for his creative endeavours since the beginning.
With his paintings, he now forces the light into a frame, creating condensed images for the viewer to immerse. In Clouds, Missotten portrays the dispersed light from thick cumulus and layers planes of paint into minutely detailed gradients. With Peeling Light, Missotten scrapes off a very thin slice of sun-ray and presents it as if under a microscope. Convinced that the coincidental shapes of nature are far superior to man-made objects, his act of painting consists of an accidental gesture of the brush during a meditative state of mind, attempting to flee away from any cultivation into the realm of pure natural self.
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Bemelmans Design is a Belgium-based studio founded one year ago by designers, and former classmates, Wout Bemelmans and Lode Debackere. The studio focuses on high-end collectible design which is completely made by hand in Belgium. Their first series called The BOLD Collection consists of elementary design objects made of solid wood and vibrant lacquer, intertwining primitive and modernist typologies into contemporary archetypes.
Bemelmans used the condition humaine as a starting point. Being trained as designer and a psychologist, he analysed the current temperature of society and came to the conclusion that people crave for reconnection both on an inter-human and man-to-object level. During his quest to translate this tendency into furniture, he reminisced about the bare furniture his grandfather, a farmer, made for daily use. This heritage would finalise the aesthetics of the young designer.
In terms of composition and construction, Bemelmans’ work marks the conjuncture of brutalist architecture and vernacular design. The materials and techniques of the recent and the far past — woodwork and Danish rope-weaving — are contrasted with rounded corners and a softening lacquer, creating a specific visual identity that provokes feelings of gentleness and humaneness. Furthermore, Bemelmans uses colour as a material. Eschewing pre-existent schemes, he instead searched for meticulous hues that would layer the object instead of covering it. In short, Bemelmans Designs The BOLD Collection bravely sets out to seek balance in today’s current of extremes..
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Tom Andries (1969) is a Belgian multidisciplinary designer and contemporary artist. His main body of work consists of abstract monochromes painted with black ink. Originally trained as a typographer and having made a generous career in graphic design and branding, Tom uncovers the hidden beauty of typography, by zooming in on its intrinsic abstract qualities. Inspired by minimalism, modernist painting and mid-century architecture, his work reflects an ongoing quest towards the absolute bare essence of art.
The proof is in the painting. The largest part of Tom’s work-process is absorbed by the meticulous preparation of a heavily texturised black ink – a mix of acrylic, Indian ink and charcoal – which he generated himself and has perfected over the years. The act of painting consists of but a few sudden and concise strokes of the heavy brush within a short frame of time, referencing to gesture painting. All is done in complete silence.
For the exhibition Hidden Landscapes of Letters, also the title of his monograph, Tom delves deeper into the very essence of typography: the grid. Every letter is shaped in relation to a certain framework. By using standard DIN paper A-formats and common canvas sizes, the work-field of the letter becomes even more part of the composition. Also for the first time, Tom has painted solely the grid and not the letter, wandering through the landscapes of pure form.
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