It’s all real

The title ‘It’s all real’ is inspired by a drawing by Fabrice Souvereyns.

Through his drawings, he makes us look differently at the world around us, a world that’s changing rapidly. With the rise of technology, we need to go back to basics, to the simplicity of materials, to craftsmanship, to beauty achieved with very few means.

The oeuvre of Jonathan Callan (b. 1961, lives and works in London) encompasses a wide range of media, methodologies and materials. It is united by a preoccupation with the limitations of language. Callan often works with texts, books, maps and photographs. A significant proportion of the information he uses is sourced from second-hand books. He sees his own culture as predominantly literary and has spent most of his life trying to reconcile his own deep interest in materiality with this pervasive literary history. The work is often playful and self-consciously renders and re-presents much of what might be considered abstract—thought, meaning, understanding—in very physical terms. Texts and images are abraded, removed, reconstituted and sometimes almost obliterated. The works can be small and intimate or expansive sculptural installations that occupy entire rooms.

Dominique De Beir (b. 1964, lives and works between Paris and Picardy) perforates paper, cardboard and polystyrene. She challenges the vocabulary of painting (material, medium and colour) and replaces it with the randomness of gestures and their impact on a surface. This allows her to focus on concepts such as scratching and digging, between surface and depth, while exploring physical impact and rhythm. By sometimes pushing perforation to the limits of what the material can handle, she plays with an inherent ambiguity between construction and destruction, opacity and transparency, durability and fragility.
Dominique De Beir’s work is characterised by the mise en abyme of a repeated gesture of perforation. The questioning here is of a painterly nature. The gesture is performed on flat media, usually poor and neutral materials such as paper, wax or white cardboard, and sometimes through sheets of carbon paper that leave irregular bluish shadows on the surface.

The plastic approach of Marco De Sanctis (b. 1983, lives and works in Brussels) simultaneously addresses the status of the image, the notion of time and the act of creation. Time is a crucial concept for understanding the artist’s work and his latest production. It becomes a concept to be re-envisioned; it functions as a quantifiable entity necessary for the creative process as well as for the intimate experience requested by the works. Mediums are plural. They question the object as much as the environment in which it is hosted, so that the image/constructed object is no longer anecdotal but very much essential to understanding the work.
The message is never political; it simply witnesses a profound thought. It is the visible image of an invisible truth, food for thought for the viewer, who re-appropriates the act of creation by perpetuating it.

Toufan Hosseiny (b. 1988 lives and works in Brussels) has chosen a medium with its own long history: textile. Her clouds subtly imply their own materiality, threads both catching light and letting it pass through. Each Cloud begins as an exercise in meditative drawing, aiming to let go, allowing instinct to take over. The result is a poetic tension, a negotiation between the mind and the body. This is followed by an elaborate journey, a slow, mindful, and deliberate approach. The drawing is transposed unto a linen canvas. The line drawings are carefully embroidered, whilst the color planes are re-woven onto the canvas, slowly filling the gaps. Each movement repeats like a mantra, and the cloud grows. It develops organically, in a process allowing for freedom, granting further poetic license and instinctive interventions as the mind quiets down. As the Clouds take on new forms, Hosseiny leaves behind traces, threads, Cloud Dust, floating around and ready to take on a new life on their own.

The sculptures of Sébastien Pauwels (b. 1977, lives and works in Brussels) are mainly composed of humble and/or repurposed materials and maintain a subtle connection with the realm of images. His figure silhouettes stimulate perceptual relationships by playing with notions of materiality, volume and weight, among other things.
The result is a unique visual language that is both autonomous and imbued with a playful approach to a particular history, from primordial forms to the present day.

Fabrice Souvereyns (b. 1995, lives and works in ‘s Hertogenbosch) uses numerous recurring starting points for his drawings.  He opts for Simili Japon paper.
A pencil, an eraser and a cutter are his only tools. The pencil touches the paper with varying degrees of force, from hard to soft; the lines hover between fragile and deep indentations.
Without a story or theme, he spontaneously investigates with flowing lines in an initial phase. In the studio, he immerses himself visually and mentally in nature, as if among the plants. What does the bark of a tree trunk or the surface of a stone look like in his mind? What is the role of light and shadow? How do all the elements of nature work together? His field of vision extends from the vastness of the cosmos to the smallest detail of a plant and every dimension in between. Science tells us that there is much more to learn about nature beyond the limits of our observation. The abstract components in his work actually refer to realities beyond our naked eye, even as they transcend the recognisable world and make it possible. I’m not just talking about floral genetics.
He occasionally uses collages and negative shapes. A rhythm evokes syncopation; he responds to a previous intervention with a countermovement. Light areas become dark, and vice versa. The artist deliberately deviates from overt virtuosity. Sometimes, he steps back. Fragments are erased. Geometric shapes bring order to the loose lines. The focal points change and the subject transforms. As the process evolves, he consciously steers the drawing in a particular direction.