Silence. Pregnant with promise

Curator:  Roxane Baeyens

Jesse Willems - Karel Van Welden - Chris Meulemans - Els Martens

Jesse Willems captures the city’s everyday beauty in his paper collages. They are delicate interpretations of fleeting fragments revealed to the artist during his walks on the outskirts of the city bustle. Through his photographs, Willems captures the graphical interplay of shapes and lines that characterise the dynamics of a large city. In his pursuit to grasp the ever-shifting shadows, he individually encases each fragmented image in paper. Willems’ body of work exudes a sense of purity and tranquillity, predominantly conveyed through subdued white tones, carefully complemented by the different hues of recycled paper.

The circular motif that looms in several of Jesse Willems’ works, wrapped in the translucent glassine sheets from photo albums, resonates with the air bubble portrayed in Karl Van Welden’s video diptych Homo Bulla (2018). Amidst the tumult of the Venice Biennale and Art Basel Hong Kong, Van Welden wandered around quiet alleyways and abandoned spaces, releasing a bubble into the air. Fragile, elusive, almost invisible, the bubble continued to glide before abruptly vanishing, leaving behind only a trace of smoke. A poetic reflection on the transience and ephemerality of our human existence. Homo bulla, “man is a soap bubble”, like Roman author Marcus Terentius Varro already understood. Because, oh my, what are we in the intimidating vastness of the universe?

With this kind of humility, Chris Meulemans embraces the silence of the blank page. The artist lets go and attempts to escape the human urge to control and fixate his environment. With a few minimal gestures, she creates a figuration that is able to resonate with everyone’s unique story, akin to the transient formation of accidental clouds. This form of figuration disappears as swiftly as it emerges. Foreground and background seem to be on a constant slope. Never unequivocal, Meulemans cautiously suggests fragments of nature, brittle and never perfect, like stains, smudges, and protrusions on the yellowed paper. Nature’s fragility unfolds within the silence of the sheet.

Greenland’s nature and a local nightclub take centre stage in Els Martens’ recent photo book in to me see in to me sea, where the artist dissects the act of observation while examining the role of light, movement, and time in image creation. Shapes, colours, and light reflections flow like the sea, seamlessly transitioning from one page to the next. In a deafening nightclub, Martens finds images of silence. A circular orange light spot silently glides over the wall like a burning sun. Red and green dots are scattered all over the dance floor like confetti. A slightly sombre pendulum dangles from the ceiling, mourning what has passed, longing for what will hopefully come to be. Momentarily, her images capture the beauty of silence. However, guided by the rhythm of the book, they remain in constant motion. With the turn of a page, the gaze and the image revolve, perpetually transforming.

The artists in Silence. Pregnant with Promise found beauty in the margins, within the silence of emptiness and the lee of the shadow, in a dark corner, on a lost sheet of paper. They cradled this beauty tenderly, as a resting point that provides perspective and is pregnant with promise.

Roxane Baeyens