In the ways that life offers, there are encounters which are sustained by the desire to discover. The gallery adds the exciting role of the witness / actor looking for the junction between the visible and the elusive.

For this exhibition, at the start of a new season, we present two artists’ new works : Florent Girard (a painter) and Erlend van Landeghem (a sculptor), two routes gathered around a touch of madness and above all by the love of creative adventure.

They don’t know each other, come from two different regions, two different cultures.

With Florent Girard, we are in discovery, into an evolving plan. There is a greedy curiosity, sparks with organised paths restoring captured moments, pieces of realities, topographies and volumes of urban outskirt areas. Memories he needs to question, discover and reconstruct.

To note down and set down on notebooks, to mix disrupted developing areas with computer graphics, to achieve a draft and give it a breath by means of the coming back to the studio, in the action of painting and in the matter. An interesting process where hand and painting come to an end and give birth to the frozen image of modernity.

With Erlend van Landeghem, we have the modernity of a tradition which clings to his history and offers us a set of volumes of an infinite richness. Carnival, masks or blind men guiding one another, we rediscover Bosch’s, Hals’s, Brueghel’s or Ensor’s Flanders.

Erlend splits up and experiments : paper, glass, polyester and silicone. He makes discoveries and takes us in his vessel for a voyage. Let us join in the dance where volumes, colours, light and tearings cut across one another. An intelligence which questions and fulfils. A happiness which nurtures on the pleasure of touching and dreaming. Come and join in this voyage, creation is part of it !

Florent Girard (1989) studied at the Art and Design National School of Le Havre and Rouen and at the Art National school of Liege in Belgium. He exhibited in Germany.

“ There are paintings which are made up with matter and abundance. The nature of Florent Girard’s works belongs to that kind.

In order to depict the strangeness of outlying landscapes which we come across in everyday life and which he searches in those colours, those vacuities and those paths, one must not only observe the visual crossings which coexist in these places but one must grasp the vanishing points, the horizons which are askew, the industrial piled up stocks and the commercial fluorescences…/…”

Baptiste Roux

Erlend van Landeghem (1965) studied at the KASK (Royal Academy for fine Arts) in Gand, Belgium.

His works can be seen in the Flemish-Brabant Province, the West Flanders Province, the Flemish Community and in many private collections.

“ Erlend is a painter and his sculptures are tridimensional supports, which are dealt with as canvas and paper pictorially speaking. This treatment brings the subject and the picture up to date. Intertwined lines cover the surface of the sculptures. Thin silicone lines are drawn-like slugs on the drawings.

Cupping glasses, disproportionate pores, ears are scattered on the body-like shapes, like the sedimented lava flows and ashes of Pompei. Layers of paint, silicone and polyester spread one after the other. They coagulate, blend together chemically, reduce into one another, get sunk, make up a complex, dull blue-green transparent, translucent membrane. ”

Patrick Greeve