Art Brussels 2025

Duo presentation with Laurent Dupont in collaboration with Gauli Zitter.

Laurent Dupont carefully repaints the surfaces of discarded cardboard boxes, mimicking the original lettering, colors, and designs that lie beneath. Overpainting these boxes can be likened to a kind of metaphysical renovation, finding meaning in the activity of simply doing it. Dupont applies his paint as one would lipstick on a pig, there is humor produced by this acknowledged futility, but also perhaps joy in its persistence.

Michael van den Abeele shares this attitude and is a little more omnivorous with material. He takes denim jeans and bleaches them into paintings that produce the weightless, retinal afterimages of Op art as they remain a heavy and common clothing fabric. His bleached metaphysical phrase “Here, nothing becomes, everything is, everything remains. In short, here one can speculate” (from André Gide’s Philoctetes (1899)) makes for an overly long door draft stopper. His untitled paravent, a traditionally decorative furniture used to block heat and cold as well as prying eyes, unfolds to reveal multiple images of rats reading books.

Both artists convert rational modules of storage and consumption. Dupont paints over empty transport boxes previously containing items such as women’s clothing (of the brand “traffic people”), live lobsters, and rice noodles. Van den Abeele turns potato chip bags inside-out, their contents voided and silver insides attached together, occasionally with their backsides or with additional images such the photoshopped sculpture of John the Baptist’s severed head resting on a pile of dirty dinner plates. A low-pixel image of a cat resting on a truck wheel is transferred in oil paint on canvas. By laboriously reanimating spent vessels, Dupont and Van den Abeele create novel reliquaries.

These formal techniques summon the body in various states (unpacking, eating, cooking, dressing, staying warm, losing one’s head, writhing in passion, reading, scrolling through images). Transport boxes are sized to arm-carry, chip bags are opened and evacuated by fingers and mouths, and furniture fundamentally accommodates the body and its needs. In both of their work, the ‘artist’s hand’ is offscreen but decidedly present and busy, painting over small letters and color matching logos, or carefully bleaching words and faithfully applying images of domestic small animals on canvas.

Both artists recruit a new kind of headlessness. At first Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and Martin Kippenberger’s pallets, packaging multiples, and oatmeal-and-paint coated Ford Capri might come to mind, but the mood here is humble, there is a lack of showmanship, outsourcing, deadpan, or aggression, and rather a willing submission to limitations. The work is quieter, more amateur and industrious than that of artists like Michael Krebber or Lutz Bacher. With programmatic, almost obsessive, practices, Dupont and van den Abeele emphasize the body’s current dissociation from spirit and passion, in a morally decadent age marked by extreme consumption but lacking the debauched sensuality of previous cultural declines. These Belgians seem to be interested in blood, sweat, and tears, in conjuring passion through restricted means, and a redemption perhaps acquired through this process.

– Jelena Kristic, April 2025