PARIS.- Since January 11 and through to February 24, 2024, Belgian sculptor Eric Croes is presenting his latest creations in the Almine Rech Turenne gallery space at Almine Rech Paris. A deep-dive into the intimate world and peculiar work of a most inspired artist.

Eric Croes never returns from his travels empty-handed. The artist has developed a habit of collecting and keeping everything he has spotted, seen and loved while on the road. Not in the digital depths of his cell phone, but in passport-sized notebooks that never leave his pockets. He covers the pages with all sorts of notes, sketches, reproductions. His notebooks serve as his memory, traces and evidence of all his discoveries and experiences. Once back in his Brussels studio, he recomposes it all with his hands: he returns to clay everything he has collected along the way.

In that sense, Croes’ work is always composite, hybrid. When he crafts his powerful shapes, deep vases, golems or totems stemming from his roving imagination, he invites us to follow in his footsteps, to wander with him. His creations bear and express his intimate legends, skin-deep. Intertwined, tangled memories, experiences and fantasies. You may on occasion identify the origin of these visions: there are escapades, true or dreamed up, to Italy or Japan. There are the many museums Croes has explored since his teens, from the Louvre to the Met, not to mention his favourite displays in Brussels. There is fauna and flora, actual or mythical animals and plants – from the poppy to the monkey, from the centaur to citrus fruits – which constantly return to bloom and grow in his work. You will also find dates, numbers, enigmatic secret words.

Every image conveys a memory – and hence a feeling, and thus reflects an emotion. Good or bad, bright or murky, they tell the story of Croes. From his passions to his obsessions, from his childhood to his daily life. Everything that inspires and fuels, everything that obsesses and illuminates. The smallest monuments can give rise to great memories. Some symbols end up changed, transformed. The figures Eric Croes designs are covered in tattoos, fully dressed for the winter. It’s a nod to the show’s title – “Like an old tattoo”, lyrics borrowed from a gentle, melancholy track by Belgian singer Arno – that shines a light on these marks of a buried past still present on the surface of our lives.

Here, for the first time, the artist has chosen to showcase the sources of his creation: his notebooks are presented in an ancient wooden display case reminiscent of classic Brussels museums. The matrix of his substance, in a sense, through which he unveils multiple origins and infinite foundations. Without betraying the mysterious nature of his assembled pieces, this insight into his artistic practice allows us to identify with and find ourselves even more in his work.

Eric Croes’ sculptures are intimately linked to his life and discoveries, but they also reflect a more universal resolve - a quest for ever-multiple beauties, a passionate pursuit of love and humour, a mix of materials and colours reminiscent of life’s polyphony, of our fantasies, of our impulses. With his strong technical acumen and ever-expanding inventiveness, Eric Croes revives and blends everything that passes through him and everywhere he passes through. To better share it all with us , and to better dazzle us.

– Boris Bergman, writer and critic

Almine Rech
Eric Croes: Comme un vieux tatouage
January 11th, 2024 — February 24th, 2024