BRUSSELS.- Galerie Nathalie Obadia presents in Brussels Ebb & Flow: Perceptions of Summer, a group exhibition bringing together a wide range of artists represented by the gallery, including Valérie Belin, Roger Edgar Gillet, Quentin Gouevic, Fabrice Hyber, Shirley Jaffe, Hoda Kashiha, Sophie Kuijken, Meuser, Laure Prouvost, Fiona Rae, Sarkis, Joris Van de Moortel, Victoria Palacios, and Wang Keping. Through this ensemble-combining photographs, paintings, drawings, and sculptures-the exhibition outlines a cartography of summer perceptions, between reminiscences and impressions linked to the season.
The face runs through the exhibition like a discreet thread: it transforms, fragments, at times even fading in favor of the sketch. Some works still remain identifiable -such as the photographs of Valérie Belin or the paintings of Sophie Kuijken and Hoda Kashiha, although rooted in fiction-while others preserve only its inprint. In Roger Edgar Gillet's work, a few lines suffice: a sketch, a barely apparent smile, and already a presence emerges. Stripped of their details, faces and other portraits first appear as thresholds: it is the viewer's gaze that constitutes them, temporarily granting them an identity.
With Fabrice Hyber, the portrait expands into an organic relationship to the world: cycles and seasons inscribe the living within a continuous flow, between rainstorms and new blooms. A form of symbiosis in which nature, bodies, and technologies coexist, prolonging into the universe of Laure Prouvost, where oneirism permeates every form.
This gradual shift from the figure toward its near-total dissolution continues in paintings that embrace abstraction, as in the works of Fiona Rae, Quentin Gouevic, and Shirley Jaffe. Here, the body gives way to painting itself: the painter's memory surfaces in the form of traces and layers, like an archaeology of gesture. Color unfolds with a remarkable and luminous intensity. From pictorial surface to sculpted matter, this logic continues throughout the exhibition: fleeting impressions settle and become fixed, as if held within form. In the works of Joris Van de Moortel, Wang Keping, and Meuser, a progression from figuration to abstraction thus emerges, where the materials themselves seem charged with memory, retaining the imprint of past experiences.
Thus, the different forms of portraiture continually operate back and forth within this new ensemble: from figure to trace, from image to sensation. Ebb & Flow: Perceptions of Summer then becomes a theater of perceptions, where- as can be observed in the work of Victoria Palacios-the fragile thresholds between the visible and the intimate are at play, between what presents itself to the eye and what unfolds inwardly.
