In Zoersel this exhibition brought quite a crowd. Two very different painters, who share an obsession which is to express what haunts them. I didn't know the work of Louisa Chevalier:
The series of empty beds, in different positions, in different states of disarray, in different light, made up or with a glaring absences of who has slept... Painful loneliness which is expressed in small paintings.
Lucienne Stassaert, Poet, prose writer and painter also chose to show her smaller work.
In different colors she paints, the presences and absence of people, the trooping together of people in strangely eerie spaces.
Her paintings are statements, like the bird who perished after an oilspill. I would call Lucienne a political painter with deep emotions. I love the texture in her work and the variations on a theme. Roger Nupie held a fine introduction, brief, informative and to the point.
George Senga is a philosopher working in Lubumbashi. He was one of the people invited to show their work. The place itself has a special kind of magic: part of the old industrial aspects have been kept as they were, and the real Restoration has made the building interesting for shows, performances, video art and just friendly gatherings of people. I saw video projections on a canvas through which you a body thus in fact projecting on a vague body. George Senga has a series of pictures with the spitting image of Patrice Lumumba. A slender man who realized his likeness and started wearing his hair like Lumumba, his jackets are alway a bit too wide in the shoulders... This is a strange way of questioning what would have become of Patrice Lumumba if he had not been killed. Would he have gone on and be the teacher to the people, would he have been "recuperated" by power and/or possibly by money... In the picture below
is on the right. I like this questioning of historical figures. There were many performances and installations, works in chalk which seem very vulnerable... I love the erased words..., creating a new meaning by omission.
