Galeria Vera Cortês opens French artist Béatrice Balcou's first Portuguese exhibition
Béatrice Balcou, The Perfect Ground, exhibition view. Photo: Bruno Lopes.
LISBON.—
Galeria Vera Cortês opened the first exhibition in Portugal by the Brussels-based French artist Béatrice Balcou, The Perfect Ground.
Béatrice Balcou is known for her performances, sculptures and installations that transform the handling and care of artworks into a ritual. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the M-Museum in Leuven, La Loge in Brussels, the Beige Gallery, La Ferme du Buisson and the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec.
Béatrice Balcou’s work is included in the collections of various institutions, including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) (Paris), the FRAC Île-de-France (Paris), the FRAC Franche-Comté (Besançon, France), the FRAC Corsica (Corte, France), the FRAC Normandy (Rouen, France), the FRAC Lorraine (Metz, France), the CIRVA (Marseille, France), the Cera–M Museum (Leuven, Belgium), the CAB Foundation (Brussels), the MACS – Grand-Hornu Museum of Contemporary Art (Mons, Belgium), the Kunsthalle (Recklinghausen, Germany), as well as various private collections in France, Belgium, Germany and the United States.
The exhibition runs until the gallery’s last day of operation, 19 December.
In the exhibition The Perfect Ground, a dozen paintings from 2026 present what appear to be monochromes, surfaces revealing a relatively uniform palette, ranging from white to reddish brown, through pale grey and beige. While these paintings possess a certain formal humility and restraint, their titles bring before our eyes a large part of the history of painting. Ground No. 1 (after Mesticolor for Giorgio Morandi, 1952), Ground No. 3 (after an unknown hand for Johannes Vermeer, 1665), Ground No. 9 (after Vieille & Troisgros for Claude Monet, 1891), Ground No. 11 (after Etel Adnan, 2014), or Ground No. 12 (after Polidoro da Caravaggio for Raphael, c. 1517–19), what lies behind these pictorial ghosts?
To answer this question, we must return to the very heart of Balcou’s work: caring for the works of others. This meticulous attention paid to pieces of which she is not the author bears witness to the artist’s desire to focus on what already exists, to redirect her gesture towards what is already there, in order to question the modes of existence of artworks as much as the conditions of their persistence over time.
Thus, the two Poor Paintings (2025), also presented here, consist in reproducing, at the scale of the original work, the restored areas of two abstractions by Marcelle Cahn. Balcou thus remains as close as possible to the material intimacy of the work, directing attention towards the traces of its alterations and the gestures through which they were repaired.
These paintings are the result of a patient process of investigation, conducted with art conservators in order to understand the pictorial strata of Cahn’s works and reconstruct the damage they had sustained. What remains on the canvas are only these areas of intervention, scattered across its surface. Painting brings to the surface what was meant to remain invisible. Balcou elevates the traces of deterioration and repair, ennobling the accidents endured by the work as much as the actions that ensured its survival.
Balcou pursues this same gesture of bringing to light what ordinarily remains hidden in the Grounds, while this time taking care of that which itself takes care: the ground color, the first layer applied to the support in order to receive the paint and contribute to its persistence.
For each painting, Balcou thus attempts to reproduce the historical preparations as faithfully as possible, whether made by Caravaggio, Monet or Agnes Martin themselves in the studio, or entrusted by them to others. This entails a genuine investigation into preparatory processes, pigments and gestures that were precisely not intended to be appreciated in their own right, but which nevertheless allow us to continue admiring so many masterpieces from the history of painting today.
This attention to the invisible overturns the customary hierarchy, since what lies buried becomes here the principal object of attention. More than the work as it is displayed on museum walls, it is the material conditions of its appearance that occupy Balcou’s attention.
Although the chromatic nuances of the underlayers of a painting are often relatively neutral, they are by no means insignificant. They determine how the subsequent layers will be applied, as well as their tonality, depth and luminosity.
Balcou’s Grounds reveal just how much these preparations vary from one painting to another in their density, their capacity to reflect or absorb light, or in the more or less visible presence of the gesture. Some offer a regular, muted surface, others reveal the weave of the support or the passage of the brush, some seem to absorb light, while others diffuse it.
From beige-grey to reddish browns, from cool whites to pinkish or golden tones, these grounds thus constitute a chromatic and material repertoire that conditions the appearance of the image. The Grounds disclose secrets, they reveal what we do not see when we look at a painting.
Through these works by Balcou, we are given the singular sense that the whole history of painting begins with a monochrome. A monochrome that is no longer the modernist culmination of painting’s reduction to itself, but an inaugural state, the moment when everything has already been prepared, yet nothing has appeared. A painting before painting that takes on the appearance of that painting after painting which the monochrome sought to be. The painting at the beginnings of a painting and the painting at the end of painting.
If the Grounds move back towards painting’s inaugural state, the Recent Paintings (2023), also presented in the exhibition, explore, by contrast, its difficult existence: the artist meticulously restored pages from art books reproducing works that had been damaged when her studio flooded.
The painting has not only undergone photographic reproduction, that reproduction has, in turn, suffered the ravages of water. Here, as in the Poor Paintings or the Grounds, the titles and the enumeration of materials provide information about the successive interventions while also bringing into view the various actors involved in the life of the work (assistants, conservators, publishers) thus making perceptible the collective dimension of its production, conservation and transmission.
The Grounds, on the one hand, and the Poor and Recent Paintings, on the other, might be read as the two ends of a pictorial temporality. The former show what precedes the advent of a painting, the latter, what has happened to it. What they all share is Balcou’s gesture of shifting our gaze towards a state of the work that is ordinarily withdrawn from attention.
