Exhibitions

The exhibition "Remembering Beautiful Things" with artists Juliette Lemontey and Laura Pasquino will take place at Château de Houtain-le-Val in Belgium.

The duo exhibition takes visitors on a poetic journey between Juliette's artworks and Laura's ceramics. It unfolds within the enchanting setting of a historic castle dating back to the 12th century. This place has witnessed the ups and downs of history, from the passions of the Duke of Brabant to the resilience of the women who have left their mark there.

Juliette Lemontey, a French painter, is known for her ability to capture life, the grace of movements, and the silences of faces. Her work on memory and identity resonates deeply with the history of Château de Houtain-Le-Val. This exhibition also marks her debut at the Grège Gallery in Belgium.

On the other hand, Laura Pasquino, a ceramist based in Amsterdam, explores life's contrasts, between softness and harshness. Through her ceramics, she plays with textures, raw strength, and the organic shapes of nature. The cracks and tears on her pieces become visual metaphors for human scars and wounds.

Natalia Jaime-Cortez

On paper and with ink, Natalia Jaime-Cortez draws. Or more precisely, sculpts. Because once completed, the elongated sheets that she folds, crumples, irons, cuts, dips and assembles, take up space. Stacked on the ground or "deposited" on metal rods, they fall or stand upright, one against the other, scrolls or sewing patterns, curtains or "shreds" of faded skin. Often, Natalia Jaime-Cortez dances with them. Her choreographies reconstitute the facts and gestures of the workshop, whose inclined floor risks "juices", these baths as revealing as those in which she immersed, originally, her photographs. Colored pigments impregnate her Thai papers, usually reserved for calligraphy. Thin and yet resistant, they have already drunk without thirst the rainwater, from the salt marshes of Guérande, from the Mekong, from the Euphrates, going all over the world, passing from hand to hand, all wandering. "It's a work of puddles", summarizes Natalia Jaime-Cortez, trained in the art of fresco, whose stormy palette - parma, brown, rust, indigo - is tinged with pale shades, like the walls of Italy in the Quattrocento. Lately, her fluid style has become even lighter: simple, almost monochromatic strips that barely overlap. Side by side, full of bubbles, furrows, they look like ponds, skies, and landscapes. In short, impressions. Their atmospheric effects recall Monet's Water Lilies which gave "the illusion of an endless whole, a wave without horizon and without shore."

Virginie Huet

Alex de Bruycker

"Everything passes and nothing remains." Alex de Bruycker has made Heraclitus' formula his own, as has Wabi-Sabi thinking. He too sees beauty in imperfection and knows the humility and flexibility that life's inherently unstable elements require. His changing canvases, opaque and transparent, are the pure expression of this. They are not actually canvases, since Alex de Bruycker, an ex-textile engineer, has replaced the classic support with solid silk, stretched in the same way as a canvas, on a wooden frame. This synthetic veil is first partially coated with a special mixture before the layers of acrylic, superimposed on the primed areas or kept intact by scotch tape, let more or less see through. The wait is long between each passage of the brush, this bow which produces, on the stiff muslin, the sound of a violin. That's how it is: the paint must dry. It is a "disfigured cross," an openwork volume made of "arches and arcs," a trembling geometry formed of isolated blocks or large flat areas full of traces. His minimal art is reminiscent of Günther Förg, who, like him, was a lover of architecture and photography, or the more radical Lucio Fontana. For Alex de Bruycker works with light and space, and his compositions all lead to other dimensions. He cannot predict the outcome. But he does have a fixed idea of the colors to be combined: cappuccino, mint, plum, blood orange... A coat he sees in the street is enough to inspire him. Tested on tracing paper, these muted or vivid shades migrate to the frame, like rays passing through a fogged window.

Virginie Huet