WET KUNST
03.09.2022 - 10.10.2022
wet: law, kunst: art
noun
1. Artists pursuing individual laws of creation. Freaks and deviants questioning authority and following their own moral compass.
The upcoming exhibition at SHAME Gallery defies notions of propriety and sexual norms. WET KUNST offers a journey into the dissenting fringes, it is a laboratory of eroticism, rebellion and disobedience through a subversion of norms and exploration of radical emotions.
Just as punk, ‘queer’ is about claiming a freedom from dulling and hypocritical normative pressures. It’s about anger, anarchy and liberating an individual space. Punk is queer, just as being queer is punk.
In WET KUNST, each artist follows their own path, their own distinctive style. Why try fitting in when wet kunst is the definition of being a rebellious individual?
CHLOE NICOSIA
HADRIEN MARTEAUX
HANNAH KIRCHER
KOMI AGAYI
MELANIE PAYEN
NATHAN FRENCH
SALOME MARTIN
SOPHIE COCHET
STANISLAS LEROUX
TATIANA GORGIEVSKI
THIERRY FALISSE
W LOUIS ROSA
ZOË NKWUGE
W LOUIS ROSA
"The causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them." (Fyodor Dostoyevski, 'The Idiot')
At first sight W Louis Rosa’s paintings seem unrelated to any context and void of any obvious meaning or intention. WLR denounces anything that would explain his work or raise questions that are blatantly obvious, and he is not seeking any credibility or purpose for his art. He strongly opposes the trend that art work needs justification, that it should address contemporary issues or question society, or hypothesize an ongoing quest. Art should not be a superficial pamphlet or a trendy pleaser. It should not be funneled into a tunnel vision that makes it depend on accountability and meaning, market forces and hypes, and plastic tricks that look interesting at first but ultimately limit the expression of the artist…
Therefore WLR does not create a fantasy world, nor does he ascribe supernatural powers to his subjects, disfigure them, fit them with strange mystical attributes or prompt the imagery with text or slogans. No spoon-feeding! Even though the artist finds inspiration in issues like gender and social equality, migration, slave labour, #metoo,... he will not show disrespect by blowing it up out of all proportions just for the sake of superficial shock-and-awe, convenient political correctness or easy approval.
WLR expects the viewer to make an effort and look beyond what is readily apparent. Whatever that comes to mind while looking at his work, the artist wants us to open our eye to ourselves, to man's intrinsic secrets and peculiarities, to the hidden autonomous complex working in the individual and society, and to make us reflect on our actions and envisage man in the grand scheme of things. But each to his own, each introspecting his/her own self, making up his/her own story, truth and explanation. As miserable or as glorious as it may be, no indulgence will be given, and ideal it will be not.
SOPHIE COCHET
Large, rapid gestures, superimpositions of sweaty paint, bright colours. My work is inspired by intimate moments, which I revisit according to their contextual elements (light, textures, atmospheres...), both real and fantasized. These suspended moments seem to float in space in front of the viewer, both shy and exuberant, fragile and strong.
Currently studying at La Cambre.
SALOME MARTIN
Salomé Martin wishes to enhance urban nature in her artwork. She creates temporal interstices conducive to the contemplation of natural beauty. The essence of his projects seizes the human links in relation to the places and questions our society’s uses and objects values.
HANNAH KIRCHER
I like to think of my work as an elastic material to be shared, which unfolds through different mediums, painting, sound and installation. My language of artistic expression is always turned towards the body - human and non-human: as a tool and as an object of visual representation. In painting, I emphasise the ambivalent relationship we have with time and with our human condition. My research explores transparency and fluidity, favouring the immediacy of the gesture. My works freeze once the gesture has been made. I use water abundantly; I see it as an agent that is both dissolving and revealing. My paintings present scenes that seem innocuous, but which are veiled in violence.
MELANIE PAYEN
Racing cars dramatically stopped, rubbles of electric cars and windmills, become archeological residues of a violent and self-destructive patriarchal civilization . These sarcastic punk representations of desolation are a pictural lecture of the myth of Sisyphus . At first sight those dystopian artefacts swallow up our optimism. However, facing repetition of disillusion and chaos, slowly revolt appears from the failure of those meaningless masculine proposal of personal achievement . As a feminist painter I invite you by the contemplation of absurdity not to surrender. We must never back down till we fulfill our potential independently.
HADRIEN MARTEAUX
“Through drawings of dolls houses that he mix with reference models taken from pornhub, Hadrien creates works influenced by the fantastic, this reality which reveals itself in its strangeness.
In this series, the figures, freed from pornhub and rendered to the scale of the buildings, become Titanides.
They are the sisters of the titans of mythology and they sweep over our world, revealing their power as well as their shadows, projected onto our daily environment.”
Hadrien is holder of a master's degree specializing in plastic, visual and spatial arts obtained at the end of the painting course at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels (ARBA-ESA).
Since leaving school, he has swapped the brush for the lead of the pencil.
He produces drawings on tracing paper which he recomposes between them by scratching them, laminating them, because the gesture and the sacrifice of the drawing matter, to form spaces of escape as well as delirious situation
The printing practice of scratch drawing gives his work a technical ambiguity that reasons with the strangeness of encounters and printed treatments to the perception of the world rendered in the work.
