CLEVELAND.- The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) presents Michaël Borremans: Hallucination and Reality, part of the Project 244 series and will be on view through Sept. 4, 2005. The CMA is the first solo museum exhibition of work by Michaël Borremans (Belgian, b. 1963) and the only United States venue showing this exhibition. The exhibition opened in Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Switzerland (Oct. 16, 2004, to Jan. 9, 2005) and is currently on view at Belgium’s Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (Feb. 5 to April 17, 2005), before it arrives in Cleveland.

Comprising approximately 63 small drawings and paintings on cardboard created between 1995 to 2004, these images are cinematic in their reference and intimate in scale. As Jeffrey D. Grove, Weiland Family curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and a curator of the exhibition notes, “Michaël’s drawings are truly free of nostalgia or sentiment. They cunningly engage the tradition of Caricature, with its tragicomic observation of social customs and behaviors and withering indictment of society moribund but unaware.” The essence of Borremans’s work transforms complex postwar political ideologies into clever ruminations on the human condition. His work comments humorously on middle-class etiquette and restraint, and the position of the artist in contemporary society. Many of his drawings are proposals for public monuments.

Since the mid-1990s, Borremans has employed reproductions of newspapers and photographic work from the early 20th century through today as source material. However, rather than referring to the material in its entirety, he zooms in on elements, modifying and alienating his imagery from its original source. They maintain a fascinating and mysteriously distanced relationship to the viewer and even create the impression of being spectral, dreamlike images.
Borremans’s exquisitely drafted pieces recall the pure technique of master draftsmen throughout time, including Hans Holbein (Dutch, 16th century), Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519) and Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917). Like these masters, Borremans’s drawings often deal with the serial, with one element considered and reconsidered within one drawing. The precision of his work recalls the Flemish portraitists. Squarely grounded in the tradition of unimaginably beautiful technique, Borremans departs from the age-old masters in genre. His images are of a world that is both dark and compelling.

He uses conflicting elements of scale, juxtapositions of disparate elements and repetitive use of cryptic motifs to engage the viewer. With the use of “marginalia” or seemingly unconnected imagery dissolving on the edges of many of the paintings, the viewer is also given the sense that they are party to a private, arcane world, only heightening the viewer’s compulsion to view the images.
The world that emerges in Borremans’s work is almost asynchronous—it could be either a distant past or a disturbing future. The work is almost a bridge between many worlds—the past masters; the world within paintings; and the contemporary. The contemporary is introduced in the method of their construction.
The exhibition, co-curated by former CMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Jeffrey D. Grove for the CMA, is a collaboration with the Museum for Gegenwartskunst, Basel and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K), Ghent.