BRUSSELS.- The group exhibition ‘Matters of Concern | Matières à panser’ launches a new, eponymous season of exhibitions devised by curator Guillaume Désanges at La Verrière, the Brussels art space of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.

After Des gestes de la pensée (‘Gestures, and thought’, 2013 to 2016), the second series of themed exhibitions at La Verrière (entitled Poésie balistique/Ballistic Poetry, 2016 to 2019) set out to explore the disconnect between the artistic protocol and its outcome or, more precisely, between intention and intuition or reception in certain forms of radical abstraction.

The season Matters of Concern | Matières à panser proposes a return to materiality, nourished by symbolism, animism, ethnography, fetichism and the therapeutic or magical uses of art, as a critical alternative to the dominant contemporary economy of de-materialisation. By referencing ‘other’ practices and ways of thinking at the heart of contemporary society and elsewhere, the series explores modes of mindfulness or attention and curiosity that subtly subvert the conventional categories of contemporary art.

MATTERS OF CONCERN | MATIÈRES À PANSER
by Guillaume Désanges
After Des gestes de la pensée (‘Gestures, and thought’, 2013-2016) and Poésie balistique (‘Ballistic Poetry’, 20162019), our new season at La Verrière marks a conscious return to the material in art, but invested with spiritual, symbolic, social, therapeutic and magical preoccupations, as a critical alternative to the prevailing contemporary economy of de-materialisation. As a young generation of artists re-appropriates artisanal techniques (ceramics, wood-carving, marquetry, tapestry), with a particular focus on raw (and sometimes industrial) materials, our opening exhibition traces unprecedented ‘family trees’ connecting the creative ‘practice’ of yesterday and today, in art and other spheres. The contemporary creative artists featured are not motivated by nostalgia or conservatism, but by a timely, collective awareness of the urgent need to rethink our habits as makers and consumers, through a celebration of conscious care and attention. To that end, this exhibition will offer a cross-disciplinary perspective on ecological concerns, through new relationships between art and the living world, objects and the elements. By presenting what are generally perceived as ‘minority’ or marginal actions and gestures, nested within our so-called ‘advanced’ society, we aim to spotlight the alternative dynamics and motivations that are shaping new forms and ideas, and subverting the established categories of contemporary art. The season’s title is borrowed from the thinker Bruno Latour!¹, in a deliberate, significant mis-translation. Disrupting the conventional hierarchy of power and vulnerability, the French phrase matière à panser suggests ‘matter in need of remedy’ but also ‘material remedies’: ritual, protective, votive, healing objects, for artists and non-artists alike. As such, these practices invoke alternative spheres of knowledge, alternative ways of thinking, which we have forgotten or no longer recognise. In their diversity of intent, these intelligent, emancipatory materials – transformative rather than transformed – trace sensitive, poetic affinities that transcend their differences.

An imprecise harmony
The idea for this themed season of exhibitions is the product of a long gestation, drawing on diverse theoretical and sensory sources. First, as a mark of continuity with the preceding two series, it proceeds (as they did) from a determination to reconcile or move beyond the contradictions of contemporary art. Here, the aim is to assert the contiguous nature of practices that have often been, if not opposed, then at least kept apart: art versus artisanship, cultural practice versus cult or religious practice, function versus decoration, modernity versus tradition. My work as an exhibition curator, and as programme director at La Verrière in particular, is conceived as a response to the constant need to disrupt and re-order the categories and hierarchies of contemporary art: a curatorial practice of aesthetic ‘disorder’ that sets out deliberately to blur artistic genres, from one exhibition to the next.

Beyond this fundamental stance, the idea for the new season sprang from an ongoing reflection, over several years, on the need for a curatorial engagement with ecological issues. It goes without saying that ecology is a central concern in contemporary society, but its concrete expression in art is far less apparent. First, because harnessing a political imperative for the making of interesting forms is invariably a delicate matter: only with difficulty can we overcome the inadequacy, even the contradiction, of attempts to aestheticize topical issues. And second, for a painful, provocative reason that attacks the very foundations of the practice of art: why and how are we to produce new art forms (even those critical of all things unecological), when our current ecological crisis prompts us to advocate a general deceleration of productive activity? A paradox indeed: is there any way to prevent even the most well-intentioned artwork from adding to the sum of ‘useless’ material clutter in this world?

Our response to this inherent, seemingly irresolvable contradiction is to approach ‘ecology’ from a different perspective, not as a subject for art, but as a thought regime. As an opportunity to take a fresh look at concrete experiences, rather than denounce the status quo. So that instead of illustrating the deadly drift of our progressive civilisation, and its inevitable demise, we can choose this moment to explore other ways of making, observing and thinking, in contemporary art and elsewhere. Perhaps (to borrow French president Jacques Chirac’s celebrated phase), it is precisely because ‘our house is on fire’ that we should be ‘looking in the other direction!².’ Not to avoid these vital, problematic issues, but to learn, or rather ‘un-learn’ from the margins. As the dire predictions of the recent past become fact today, Man’s relationship to Nature has become central to the most stimulating contemporary debates, those that challenge our modernist ideologies. In this, we do not seek a return to ‘worthier’, archaic models, but to update our thinking through the experience of alternative ways of relating to the material world: modelling our approach on the established modi of anthropology, ecology and ethology, through the prism of certain feminist scientific and ethical theories. In short, we take as our starting-point a reversal of rights and obligations in the realm of living things, a challenge to the dominance of the human race, a reconsideration of the non-human as object rather than subject, and generally, the recognition of a shifting system of relationships over a perceived (im)balance of power within ecosystems. This thinking is based on a concept of finitude and continuity: each production is envisaged as a co-production, and each act of appropriation as an exchange. We should also privilege alternative temporalities for our observations and research, generating alternative knowledge. Our current, unprecedented ecological ‘moment’ invites us to witness the unexpected coming-together of a number of issues: political, moral, judicial, scientific and social. A benign alignment of affects – a planetary alignment of sorts – that will inevitably permeate the sphere of art, however subtly, and the production and reception of artworks.

The season when dreams explode
‘Matters of concern’, matières à panser: a quest for other ways of making and doing, then, rather than a refusal to make or do. An attempt to re-enchant the world, rather than spectate its destruction as awe-struck, fascinated by-standers. An embrace of multiple perspectives, over the relentless race to the single (fateful) vanishing point of History. And an opportunity to refocus on neglected skills and expertise, ideals incarnate, the spiritual in the material. Even, simply, to observe the creative status quo from a new paradigmatic standpoint, discerning new intentions, new attentions, new moral and sensory ‘dispositions’ that counter the cynicism of blind, disembodied overproduction. New? No, this integrated regard for the material world is ancient indeed, but it is not ‘primitive’ for all that. Rather, it is permanent, resilient, and distinct from a simple shift of perspective from the centre to the margins. We do not need to seek alternative practices on the other side of the world, nor far back in the origins of the history of forms; they are here, nearby, and closely connected to the modern world. The fact is, we may have stopped seeing, but we have never stopped believing.

Indeed (and this is another reason for our new series) these practices are directly connected with specific, ground-breaking movements in contemporary art, notably the revival of manual, artisanal skills, with a penchant for natural materials and traditional techniques, both in the ‘neo-craft’ movement and at the core of what has been called ‘post Internet’ art: new preoccupations that invoke spheres of knowledge hitherto neglected in the contemporary art world. As if the ethnographical tendency in art, observable since the late 1990s³, had suddenly found new, material expression and form: a shift from discourse to gesture. And a concomitant shift in the role of artists: the critique of ‘progress’ enacted non-verbally through the artist’s gaze, and interaction with his or her raw materials. Making rather than talking. A form of concentration that favours conscious attention over research, intimacy over distance, and opens the way to an explosion of possibilities for the object in art. A reminder that specific materials have their own inherent substance and form, their own history, their own intelligence and emotionality.

A wild garden
The season’s opening exhibition offers a wide-ranging approach to this constellation of affective rather than theoretical considerations, through a diverse selection of work. From Artavazd Pelechian’s lyrical film of Armenian shepherds gathering their sheep to bring them down the mountainside, to artist Gina Pane burying a ray of sunshine in the Normandy countryside; and from the mysterious stained glass panel of Mamadou the Healer of Toubaix to the cathartic, therapeutic dance of American choreographer Anna Halprin. From medical items, decoratively repurposed by people living with AIDS, to Karen Kamenetzky’s cellular tapestries. From Raymonde Arcier’s giant feminist dolls, to Aline Ribière’s organic clothing, and vernacular effigies by Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter. From mineral sculptures by Lois Weinberger to Maria Laet’s hieratic interventions in the natural scene. From Camille Blatrix’s strange artisano-industrial forms, to Jean-Luc Moulène’s hybrid sculptures and Igshaan Adams’s woven explorations of identity. Disparate practices which, each in their own way, pay close attention to the object and its raw materials, imbuing them with unique sensory, affective, symbolic or therapeutic power. Contrasting worlds, united by their shared focus on handiwork (including the invisible hand of nature) and/or figuration. The exhibition charts aesthetic routes that take the curator of contemporary art – forever steeped in the assertive rigour and minimalism of conceptual forms – to new shores, stepping lightly from artisanship to art, and amateur or militant practice, with no implication of hierarchy. Drawing on diverse aesthetic approaches, the exhibition stands as an ecosystem in its own right, or more humbly as a garden, in Gilles Clément’s definition, incorporating what some would describe as ‘weeds’: disregarded objects, plants without name.

In the wake of a season focusing on the apparent, irreductible remoteness of certain highly programmatic artforms, this new season at La Verrière favours conductive materials, transactional objects and practicality. Works that celebrate artistic value and utilitarian forms, blurring the boundaries between function and fiction. Ultimately, the new season will strive to implement a ‘curatorial ecology’ through close, mindful attention to things and their interrelationships, whatever their origins or purpose: a speculative, dreamlike practice that seeks out new beauties, not in celebration of things alien to the reflexes of contemporary art, but simply by choosing to ignore, if only for a moment, the objects’ coordinates within a specific system of values.