The tragic power of Berlinde de Bruyckere
About the monographic exhibition held at MO.CO in Montpellier (34) until 2 October.
Vulnerable, ephemeral, alone, dying... The monumental beings seen by the artist Berlinde de Bruyckere are perhaps not only frightening because they are made of animal skins and wax imitating raw flesh, but because they remind us of our fragile condition as creatures standing between life and death. The Belgian artist had already stunned us in 2013 when we discovered her in Avignon in the exhibition Les Papesses. Among the 360 works of art brought together by Éric Mézil, between the Collection Lambert and the Palais des Papes, under the aegis of the emblematic figure of Joan the Papess, who is said to have attained the status of pope in the 9th century by disguising herself as a man, those of the artist born in Ghent in 1964 had further broadened the horizon opened up by her elders.
We already knew Camille Claudel, Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois and Jana Sterbak. We had already experienced the bewitchment induced, or not, by the sight of their sculptures in marble, terracotta, plaster, bronze, sewn fabric, glass, ceramics or papier-mâché... But as far as we were concerned, we had never yet found ourselves stunned in front of the materialized work of the one we knew to be the rising star of contemporary art, for the good reason that she represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale that year with "Bois à brûler" (wood to burn). This Biennale had already brought her international recognition in 2003 with "The Black Horse", a blind and deformed horse body. These skins and flayed flesh literally had us on the spot in the majesty of the Palais de Papes. And the two horse bodies melted into each other remained engraved in our memory.
In the end, we were as seized with fear as with wonder. Because this technique combining tinted wax imitating skin with wood, wool, leather, mane or hair... was definitely not just a technique. Even less a posture. Berlinde de Bruyckere nourishes her work with the real thing. This daughter of a butcher and granddaughter of florists knows nature and bruised flesh. The former resident of a strict Belgian Catholic institution places suffering at the heart of her work by exploring the duality between life and death. By immersing herself in Christian iconography, associated with martyrdom and redemption. The result is all the more powerful because his only religion is art.
The opportunity is unmissable to finally meet this artist in France, whose success is more German or international than French, in the ambitious exhibition dedicated to her at the MO.CO in Montpellier until 2 October.
"Sensitive souls should abstain," warns Fabien Simode in the title of his article for this summer's L'Œil magazine. With Berlinde de Bruyckere, represented notably by the art galleries Hauser & Wirth and La Galleria Continua, controversy is never far away. When she floats sculptures of women on the canals of Ghent or hangs sculptures of dead horses in trees, she inevitably creates an event as much as a stir and disgust. At the beginning of her artistic career she was probably less disturbing with her minimalist assemblages of stone, wood, steel and concrete. Nevertheless, it was with her installations of more organic and malleable material that she became known in the 1990s. First with her installations inspired by images of the famine in Somalia, the war in Kosovo and the Rwandan genocide. Suffering, we told you. And humanity in all its tragic aspects. You don't see faces, but feet first. Coming out of cages or blankets. The fine bluish veins that show through under the skin reconstituted with diaphanous wax mixed with pigments. The horses will come next. The horses sacrificed on the battlefields.
"Exhausted bodies, amputated and emaciated limbs, dying horses...: few works in the history of art show so forcefully the tragic human condition and its finitude" writes Fabien Simode, who went to meet her in her Belgian studio while she was putting the final brushstroke to her latest series, "Arcangelo". The journalist does not hesitate to evoke Berlinde de Bruyckere's filiation by invoking the power of paintings such as Grünewald's convulsed Christ falling from his cross with all his weight in the "Issenheim Altarpiece" (1512-1515), Holbein's "Dead Christ" (1521-1522), Rembrandt's "Flayed Ox" (1655), Soutine's "Agnus Dei" (1925) or Zurbaran's "Agnus Dei" (1635-1640). Not forgetting the sculpture, starting with the polychrome roundel of the Middle Ages, but also Ligier Richier's 'Transi' (1545-1547), Camille Claudel's 'Torso of Bald Cloth' (1893) or Germaine Richier's 'La Mante' (1946).
Does Berlinde de Bruyckere paint or sculpt? "I feel more like a painter than a sculptor, especially recently," the artist confided to a journalist from the magazine L'Œil. "I've been looking a lot at how Cranach and Giorgione translated the skin in their paintings. Because of course, when you are born in Ghent and escape from a school trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in your home town at a very young age to immerse yourself in the rich collection of Flemish paintings, you will long remember Jerome Bosch's "Carrying of the Cross" (ca. 1515) and his Christ being mocked by frightening trognes. That day, Berlinde de Bruyckere fell forever into the physical experience of art. She went on to study at the Sint-Lukas College of Art in Ghent, from which she graduated in 1986.
As Fabien Simode points out, the Flemish artist is deeply "imbued with the paintings of Quentin Metsys, Rogier Van der Weyden and the Van Eyck brothers, their Annunciations and Depositions of the Cross, as well as their way of treating them, with that expressiveness and realism that make you touch the wounds of Christ with your eyes". From her forebears, Berlinde de Bruyckere "has the powerful compositions, the sense of drama and the truth of the flesh. Are her figures covered in animal skins not the descendants of the distant St John the Baptists who populate the Flemish Renaissance? And aren't his monsters the heirs of Bosch's Garden of Delights? In any case, they move us.