EFFUSIONS OF LIGHT: IN COLLABORATION WITH LA ’S’ GRAND ATELIER
(May 30 - August 2, 2019)
Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present the work of three remarkable artists from Belgium’s La ’S’ Grand Atelier. Each has a very individual style, and each works abstractly. In the cases of Éric Derochette and Joseph Lambert one could say the works are pure abstraction, as opposed to Philippe Da Fonseca who abstracts the facades of buildings in ghostly layers.
Each brings to Art Brut a different, vivid approach to the world.
Like Creative Growth in the U.S., La ’S’ Grand Atelier respects and encourages its artists’ freedom to make whatever work they wish to make, traveling in whichever direction they feel they must. The three artists being shown here have worked long and hard enough to present three carefully developed visions.
Éric Derochette’s highly gestural works are performances documented by his keen sense of color, from dark to almost luminescent. The surfaces, sometimes picking up the marks of protuberances in his table top, are worked hard and are surprisingly delicate in the muscularity of their accumulated layers of lines. All three of these artists make obsessive work but Derochette captures ecstatic movement in his marks. His ultimate effect is a musical transcendence.
Joseph Lambert doesn’t vocalize much. He was a carpenter born in Ardennes, Belgium in 1950, specializing in a type of close-fitting marquetry. This experience has translated to the tightly knitted intricate formations in his drawings. He begins with letters as a made up form of writing which he extends across the page in long tight curving movements, but eventually covers them in other marks. There is a topography to his work; he has melded a wordless language with the striations of the earth. They are his stories told in his own formula of visual speech, they are sound where he is usually non-verbal. He has given us the ability to see his voice.
Philippe Da Fonseca’s ethereal buildings remind one of walking at twilight through a city coated in a shifting mist. The buildings themselves are not stable, they change constantly between the second and third dimension almost as if we were seeing, not only buildings rooted in the present, but also buildings moving in the diaphanous fabric of our senses of memory. He is a master of semi-transparency. Ultimately these structures are as much shrines as they are buildings.
Cavin-Morris is dedicated to exposing global Art Brut in the United States with an emphasis on living artists. We welcome the opportunity to show these artists from La ’S’ Grand Atelier in our developing international outreach. We feel these three artists are vital to that goal.