BRUSSELS.- With Dressage Ruined by Puffers, Belgian artist Lisa Vlaemminck presents a new series of shaped paintings at rodolphe janssen. Cut from wood into recognisable silhouettes—a tooth, a hairstyle, a slice of cheese, a chicken leg—the works establish a relation between the physical form of the support and the image painted onto it. The two do not necessarily correspond. A recognisable contour can carry an unrelated image, while the image can alter how the contour is perceived.
In Vlaemminck’s work, shape and subject enter into an oblique relationship, sometimes echoing one another, but more often refusing to line up. Familiar forms operate almost like visual fragments or signs, while the paintings remain elusive. What initially appears legible becomes strange through a shift in scale, context or meaning. This process of extraction and recontextualisation extends from the still life to the visual language of everyday life, advertising and popular culture, where objects are selected, arranged and aesthetically charged.
The shaped panel occupies a space between object and image, body and landscape. Vlaemminck combines a fascination with the physicality of objects and painting with the increasingly weightless, digital nature of images. Forms that circulate as pixels or visual fragments acquire a physical body, while tangible objects are translated into images and signs.
Food, anatomy and consumer objects occupy a similar space between attraction and repulsion. Removed from their functional context, they become images, while images retain associations with things that can be touched, eaten or handled. This recalls the logic of the still life, where objects are isolated, composed and charged with meanings beyond their use. In a culture saturated with images of things to desire, consume and possess, repetition and displacement can turn attraction into excess, discomfort or rejection.
The distinction between subject and object consequently becomes unstable. The abject appears in this space between the two: neither fully object nor fully subject. A bodily fragment can become an object of contemplation; an everyday object can acquire the status of a fetish; an image can retain the suggestion of something physical, edible or corporeal.
Shape, image, material and association operate through shifting relations. Their interaction recalls John Conway’s Game of Life, where simple rules of interaction generate patterns and complex structures. In Vlaemminck’s paintings, elements similarly support, obstruct and transform one another. The paintings construct small worlds in which the rules of one form can become the disturbance of another.
Dressage Ruined by Puffers describes a world governed by rules that are constantly being interrupted by the forms they produce. What is brought into shape can swell, shift or turn against its own organisation. During the development of the works, Febe Lamiroy wrote Focus on the Horizon in the studio. The text, conceived as a verbal collage, accompanies the paintings.
Lisa Vlaemminck’s oeuvre manifests a profound interrogation of the ontological boundaries between abstraction and figuration, blending visceral imagery with psychedelic and abstract compositions. She isolates and magnifies certain objects—like torsos, nails, or food—creating an uncanny effect that hovers between familiarity and alienation. Her canvases, suffused with an almost synesthetic vibrancy, challenge the viewer’s perceptual faculties, oscillating between the ephemeral and the corporeal. Her work reflects the fetishist appeal of consumerism, capturing the seductive allure and contradictions of the advertising world. Bright, surreal colors and references to popular culture evoke both beauty and the grotesque, mirroring the dual nature of consumer goods. In addition to her paintings, which range from rectangular to more organic, irregular shapes, Vlaemminck’s artistic practice is distinguished by her exploration of diverse materials and media. She frequently incorporates textiles such as tablecloths and curtains, contrasting these softer elements with more rigid, alien-like materials like resin and plexiglass.
After graduating at KASK in 2015, her works were included in several personal and group exhibitions at S.M.A.K, Ghent, Belgium, NW, Aalst, Belgium; rodolphe janssen, Brussels, Belgium; BOZAR, Brussels, Belgium; CIAP, Hasselt, Belgium; Triennial Bruges, Belgium; Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium; Roger Raveel Museum, Zulte and KIOSK, Ghent, Belgium and more. Her work is included in Muse d’Ixelles, Belgium Collectie FOD Buitenlandse Zaken, Belgium; Collectie Vlaamse Gemeenschap, Belgium and a permanent installation at DoRemy daycare, Leuven, Belgium, Collectie Vlaamse Gemeenschap – M Leuven, Belgium and FRAC Normandie, Caen, France.
