Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
Meessen De Clercq presents a project with two French artists, Benoît Maire and Aurélien Froment.
Since the Renaissance, Western art history has witnessed the increasing importance of the individual and his voice, both in the depicted subjects, as in the place attributed to the artist. In Figures of Speech, Aurélien Froment underlines this by showing images of communicating people depicted on the medieval Apocalypse Tapestry. An anthropocentric approach of individual expression as an anachronism.
The growing importance of the individual has also lead to a greater responsibility in daily decision-making processes. Influenced by western philosophers such as Hegel, Benoît Maire reinforces the connection between decision-making, which is inevitably a selection made out of different options, and the physical act of cutting. His sculptures present us with fragments of elements, which have been severed by the artist from their usual context of meaning.
This act of cutting has also been made by Aurélien Froment. Inspired by his experience as a projectionist in the cinema, he brings to life again the images which were inserted to connect two reels of film and which were inevitably never shown to the public. In an act parallel to Benoît Maire’s decontextualization, Aurélien Froment leaves open the field of interpretation by the viewer, by choosing only a detail or background image. Thus they leave the attribution of sense to the individual spectator and his ability of making choices, of cutting into his own referential worlds.
