Meessen, Brussels
Léa Belooussovitch & Jorge Méndez Blake
This is a dialogue between the practices of Léa Belooussovitch and Jorge Méndez Blake around the notions of erasure and reconstruction. More specifically, it explores the way in which these two artists transform pre-existing elements—media images related to dramas for Belooussovitch, literature and architecture for Méndez Blake—in order to offer a poetic and critical reinterpretation of the world.
In her woollen felt drawings, Léa Belooussovitch reproduces media images of dramatic scenes of human or natural origin through a delicate blurring. By blurring these representations and translating them into a soft and insulating materiality, she creates a visual and emotional shift, attenuating the brutality of the images while questioning their impact. Her work focuses on memory, perception and the omnipresence of images in the era of over-mediatisation, inviting a sensitive and introspective contemplation.
By taking the text found on the fragmentary manuscript ‘Adventures in the Skin Trade’ by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, this installation by Jorge Méndez Blake questions the writing process, and the frustrations and difficulties of creating any piece of text. Meanwhile, the artist’s calligrams redraw the spatiality of the text, transforming it into visual compositions. The blurring and disappearance in Belooussovitch’s felt-tip drawings respond to Méndez Blake’s broken and recomposed texts: a tension between erasure and rewriting. Both artists question the transmission and reception of narratives, whether visual or textual. Through ‘invisible resonances’, these works echo absent or transformed realities, inviting us to perceive differently that which is hidden or deconstructed.
