Marcel Berlanger - Fig.

February 10–May 27, 2018

Last part of an exhibition by artist Marcel Berlanger (Brussels, 1965) rolled out in four locations, Fig. explores the relations between painting and scenography. After Furnes (Emergent), Eupen (Ikob) and Brussels (rodolphe janssen), Charleroi’s BPS22 Art Museum of Hainaut Province welcomes the artist who develops another preoccupation of his work: the spatial arrangement of his painted pictures.

As its title implicitly indicates, the exhibition focuses on the notion of “figure,” which is one of the fundamental interrogations behind Marcel Berlanger’s painting. Indeed, his art is an art of revelation in the photographic sense of the term, which consists in delivering an image (which is itself drawn from another image, either a photo or a screen shot) and unveiling its pictorial origin. The manner of painting a subject is as important as the subject itself. Often perceptible at first glance, the chosen motif is not irrelevant, it results from a whole of formal, symbolic, psychological and affective preoccupations.

For this exhibition, Marcel Berlanger immersed himself in the stock of images that he keeps on his computer. These pictures of plants and landscapes (inspired by Cézanne, amongst others), famous personalities or still, scientific images of flora and fauna, which he reproduces using the grid technique whereby the image is split up into squares before each square is reproduced. Beyond very specific plastic qualities, these figures convey extrinsic meanings that superimpose and follow one another in the spatial construction of the show. Visiting the exhibition becomes a journey in a huge image book where every picture is subtly connected to the next.

After approaching the pictorial, figurative and installation aspects of his work during previous shows, Marcel Berlanger broaches the scenographic dimension of its exhibitions. Made especially for the exhibition, immense paintings hanging in the space add structure to the Museum, drawing a veritable, specific semantic scenography. Their gigantic scale suggests that they could very well be stage sets of a huge show, where the exhibition would be no more than a frozen state and in which the spectators would have a role to play. Such is the case of an immense canvas (7x7 m) representing in an illusionist manner the inside of a cave and that serves as a “backdrop” for the entire show.

Reinstating the director/painter relationship that made the latter a prop man for the former—even when the painter is skilled, like Louis Demoulin at Waterloo’s Panorama—in charge of creating illusionist sets, the artist suggests the shift in status of these paintings according to the context of perception. These pieces can be approached as autonomous works falling into a space mechanism that articulates them between themselves for the duration of a show, and the elements of the set that the actors would have to set into play.

Four exceptional representations of theatre play Iwona, an electronic opera, after Yvonne, Princesse de Bourgogne by Witold Gombrowicz (written and staged by the artist’s sister, Françoise Berlanger) will pace the exhibit and will be played on stage in the BPS22 on April 12, 13 and 14, 2018.

Marcel Berlanger welcomes other artists in his exhibition: Françoise Berlanger, Gilbert Nouno, Isabelle Wéry, Sébastien Capouet, Eric Angenot, Nicolas Valckenaere & Tom Valckenaere.

Curator: Pierre-Olivier Rollin Co-production: Emergent (Furnes), Ikob (Eupen), rodolphe janssen (Brussels) and BPS22 (Charleroi)