L’Intime & Le Monde
from friday 8 december 2017 to sunday 4 february 2018
Marianne Berenhaut, Sarah Kaliski, Arié Mandelbaum
Installations, paintings and drawings.
Commissariat: Gérard Preszow and Lucie Duckerts-Antoine.
L'Intime & Le Monde highlights a selection of works by three contemporary Brussels artists: an installer, Marianne Berenhaut, and two painters, Sarah Kaliski and Arié Mandelbaum. Beyond their singularities, they share manifest common traits in their relationship to the world, their imagination, their biography and their respective quest. They all play incessant trips back and forth from the intimate of suffering and desiring bodies to the horrors inflicted by history. These three artists don't belong in school. They do not constitute an aesthetic community but a common destiny and the memory revisited - the generation of Brussels Jewish children who survived the extermination - unite them and compel each to make visible, to update a common time founder of their journey of life and creation. Everyone speaks to us in his own way of a world they share.
Marianne Berenhaut (born in Brussels in 1934) presents everyday objects. By hiding and recovering what inspires it, it ennobles the waste of the world. She rigorously arranges her findings and narrates their reassembly, oscillating between tragedy and humor. His installations say the absence, the without return and the vain waiting but also the childhood and the twinship.
Irrepressible ardor and energy enliven Sarah Kaliski (Brussels 1941 - Paris 2010), painter, designer and writer. Any medium is suitable for his passions: dried avocado peels through cardboard coasters, tarpaulins superhuman dimensions and noble tissue paper. She has never ceased to go from amorous sagas to the tragic destinies of children and families destroyed and exterminated. Nothing stops Sarah, but death comes too soon.
In Arié Mandelbaum's paintings (born in Brussels in 1939), refined portraits and scenes of history emerge from the white, return, and return. The vibrations of time are infinite. They have the elusive presence of moving specters. Body without body, volumes in levitation, the painter summons the memory. It is literally by the blind white of the eyes that the world and the intimate are exchanged.
Gérard Preszow