Schönfeld Gallery | Rivoli

Verweven/ entrelacés, Curator: Marie Mees

Leyla Aydoslu Willem Cole Veerle Beckers Lize Maekelberg Camille Paroissien Honoré d’O Celine Lambrechts Jana Visser Helena Cnockaert Dirk Braeckman Thomas Renwart Charlotte Stuby Basile Rabaey (video) Basile Rabae

For Schönfeld Gallery, curator Marie Mees braids her years of experience with endless threads and fibres intuitively into a fresh selection of artists. As a textile designer, she cherishes craftsmanship and attention to detail. Her own style is radical: timeless and sustainable, minimalistic, and aesthetic. Like her designs, this exhibition is an ode to the material with a focus on interdisciplinary action. “It is not so much the desire to do something as to listen to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials”, noted Anni Albers, one of the pioneers of textile art. Leyla Aydoslu, Veerle Beckers, Dirk Breackman, Helena Cnockaert , Willem Cole, Honoré d’O, Celine Lambrechts, Lize Maekelberg, Camille Paroissien, Basile Rabaey, Thomas Renwart, Charlotte Stuby and Jana Visser each show the richness of the material in their own way and celebrate the joy of creating.

Blowing weaves, dripping drapery, rich patterns and shiny brocade are just a few examples of how textiles in compositions have captured the artist’s imagination for centuries. Veerle Beckers uses traces from everyday life to create moments that are irrevocably past. A sock, the contours of a curtain or the pattern of a kitchen towel contain condensed the melancholy of fragmented holding. In his characteristic uncanny style of grey tones, photographer Dirk Braeckman touchingly grasps the poetry and texture of fraying fibers as a metaphor for our fragile existence. Willem Cole draws with fine pencil lines on slate meticulously technically accurate the grid of a woven piece of fabric. The small works confront monumentally with the aesthetic power and pure simplicity of the warp and weft technique as an all-encompassing still life.

The magic of matter is a recurring motif in Honoré d’O’s kinetic installations. It is the interaction with the viewer that forces the work of art to its full meaning. Just like cotton bolls are spun into threads before they become textile products. The raw material opens a web of connotations: from beauty rituals, softness, and nurturing to the fraught history of cotton cultivation. Basil Rabaey evokes a reference to the industrialization of the process with a glimpse of the co-operative Insurance building in Manchester peeking through the blinds. With his videowork he takes us into the repetitive action of weaving and the process from sheep to finished wool product. Celine Lambrechts chose the sheep for the video and her wool not without obligation. The origin of the material is an investigation into her identity and the Lier nickname “sheep’s head”. The Kempen heath sheep produces stiff, pungent fibres. From the artisanal struggle to become a functional product, she creates beauty and strength by embracing the imperfection of the material, its irregularities in color and texture. Leyla Aydoslu incorporates found and rejected textile products, often from the construction industry, in her sculptural installations. Guided by and with great respect for the material, she seeks connection and tension. It is about the feeling that the matter evokes and the boundaries it indicates. The application possibilities of fibers are brimming with abundance. By instinctively contrasting different techniques into colorful textile installations with traces of symbolism and personal references, Charlotte Stuby embroiders, appliqués, quilts and weaves a fascinating and other- wordly dream world. Lize Maekelberg felts brightly fresh and colorful scenes from her own living environment. Camille Paroissien stretches the richness of wool to the maximum. She uses color and texture contrasts to relate her personal experience of landscapes to lyrical, hand-woven works of art full of imagination. Helena Cnockaert embroiders and felts an entire village together, literally, because the heart-warming stickmen were created as a unifying project for the community during the Kunstenfestival

When action and image coincide, textile art exceeds the material and intimate, personal creations reveal themselves. The delicate piece of hand-woven flax by South African Jana Visser exudes intuitive expression. She allows matter, time, and space to enter a dialogue with each other, both sensitively and cognitively, evoking her work to transcend the purely visual. Layers of meaning arise from the slow rhythm of the weaving movement and the ensuing intimate observations and self-reflection. The jacquard woven, personal and pictorial carpets by Thomas Renwart also emphasize the conceptual capacities of the material in addition to an overwhelming technicality. The intimate visual poems bear personal texts about loss. The symbolic force transcends matter.

Once treated as the Cinderella, textile art is back from never being gone. Embroidery, lace, crochet, and tapestries have a long tradition in our region and a new generation of contemporary artists is ready to give it their own interpretation. The classical techniques remain important, but with story and individual originality they create unique works of art. Visual work with needle, thread, wool, and yarn is a full-fledged art form that combines the artistic idea with craftsmanship and authenticity. Perhaps the contemporary flourishing of textile art has to do with what Anni Albers already knew in 1938: It is no accident that nervous breakdowns occur more often in our civilization than in those where creative power had a natural outlet in daily activities. Which led her to the following suggestion: We must come down to earth from the clouds where we live in vagueness and experience the most real thing there is: material.

Femke Vandenbosch