Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels
Julien Meert
From his work Julien Meert showed almost exclusively his painting practice, but he maintained tenuous links with other disciplines. Music, video, drawing and collage. One could take the risk of saying of his practice that it is essentially introspective and that there are variations in front of us around a theme: solipsim.
The solipsism is defined by Wittgenstein in Le Microcosme as «I am my world».
This is probably why Julien Meert’s painting seems so elusive, complex, composed of fragments, recognizable but «uncertain» gestures. How could one look at his paintings «his world», that a cup handle, an egg and a ladder are a set of clues that make up a self-portrait?
Reading the work of Julien Meert means agreeing to take the time to decipher the many signs that dot his painting.
It also means picking up keys elsewhere, in what it seldom gives to see or hear through other practices. With his musical alter ego Roger 3000, he takes us on a ballad in the true and figurative sense, composing alone (Solipsime: Solus/Only and Ipse-self) soft and complex melodies with lyrics that destabilise the words and
actions of everyday life.
In his collages, he depicts himself, naked body and face, those of his relatives sometimes, in pastel post-apocalyptic universes from which life is gone but where remains, tirelessly, the human being, wandering and cogitating.
His videos testify to the wanderings of his own character in an arcade aesthetic, as if life worked in steps, entrances, exits, escapes, levels, trays…
Julien Meert is his own world, therefore “Only the self can therefore be considered to be definitely existing and the external world with its inhabitants exists in this perspective only as a hypothetical representation, and therefore cannot be considered, without abuse of language, other than as uncertain […]”.
For Art-O-Rama, Sorry We’re Closed proposes for the first time to show all the practices of Julien Meert, in an installation composed of paintings, drawings, collages and videos.
http://www.sorrywereclosed.com/en/galerie/accueil/0/sorry-we-re-closed
