On the occasion of the finissage of Michel Frère, we are hosting a conversation with the exhibition’s curator Anne Pontegnie and Rudi Bekaert on Michel Frère from 4 pm.
Excerpt from: Puff the Magic Dragon; or, Breaking the Terrorism of Abstraction — An Interview with Michel Frère by Richard Milazzo —
“I don’t think my paintings go against the grain. They just don’t match Pop issues. I guess for me, Pop has to deal with a kind of irony or critical statement about art and culture, and I decided very early on that my work would not be about that. Belgium, where I grew up, had a very strong tradition of criticism and irony in art since the 19th century (Ensor, Magritte, Broodthaers). I thought irony and criticism were too easy, and that I would not use predetermined contemporary art schema to build my work. I tried to resist using over-intellectualized, referential methodologies, and not to use any meaning or ideology of any kind. But, of course, the danger is you wind up producing boring paintings that are not recognizable as contemporary or that we no longer take to be modern. Naively I thought maybe I was over all these problems, that everybody understood them, and that it was not necessary to speak about them again. I think irony is the worst thing that can happen to a painting. It is like asking a painting to be intelligent. I have never heard of that, but I have heard that some paintings are beautiful, amazingly beautiful, unspeakably beautiful. Of course, we can speculate about what beautiful means, and I guess everybody has an opinion. Some people even think that some Duchamp readymades are beautiful (although he personally didn’t), or that a Ryman or a Buren is beautiful, that statements about art are beautiful. Which is fine, but then we are dealing with this “about” and not with art anymore. Nor does this mean that statements about art are not interesting or important. I personally think they are highly interesting, as statements.”