Hangar, the photo art center of Brussels, presents for the first time some artists in an art fair. These artists, who already exhibited at Hangar as part of “institutional” shows, display here artworks never shown before.
The work of the “trio” Vincent Fournier (FR, 1970), Paul D’Haese (BE, 1958), and Alice Pallot (FR, 1995) features some common aspects, among them, their sensibility to capturing the outside world.
Vincent Fournier displays for the first time his new work "Kosmic Memories". This series reveals extraordinary architectures, true totems of civilization, signs of a “possible elsewhere”. It is not by chance that this science fiction universe was born between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s, especially in the satellite and non-aligned countries of Eastern Europe.
If all these buildings have different functions, commemorative, political, their forms draw from a common source: the invention of a future inspired by science fiction. We can see a kind of Prehistory of the Future with flying saucers, space stations, and a multitude of geometrical shapes from another planet. Built mostly in concrete and at the tops of stellar landscapes, these monumental architectures display an unearthly telluric power. Their location, while often a place of memory, also coincides with dawn or dusk, with a lateral light that reinforces their strangeness. Brutal, futuristic, utopian, mystical, esoteric beauty... between “Tintin and the Temple of the Sun” and the monolith from “2001, A Space Odyssey”, these sentinels embody the dream of a future that is always to come. (Enki Bilal)
Isolated places charged with history are also present in Paul D’Haese’s latest series "Borderline", displayed at Hangar for the first time. He created these works during hiking trips along the northern French coast. The artist focused on the border between the built-up country and the wide sea. Five years ago, he conceived, for the first time, the idea of exploring this boundary line. Since then, he has been following a route, about 350 km as the crow flies, from Bray-Dunes to Le Havre. He has crossed about fifty villages and towns, with his camera, first by car, then by bicycle, and finally on foot, creating a body of 169 photographs.
Blurring the boundaries between reality and phantasmagoria, the young artist discovered by Hangar, Alice Pallot, unveils the second part of her "Suillus" series, “looking at the sun with closed eyelids”.
In the twentieth century, the emissions from the former zinc factory in Lommel (Belgium) made vegetation completely disappear across several hundred hectares, giving way to an arid landscape covered by white sand. This desertic landscape is now called Lommel’s Sahara. To avoid the extension of the sandy plains, a new forest of conifers was planted, creating a unique nature reserve. The pines were able to survive through symbiotic coexistence with a fungus, the Suillus Bovinus. Naturally resistant to zinc, it has protected the trees and other reemerging vegetation from ecotoxicity.
Alice Pallot is fascinated by natural phenomena, metamorphoses, and silent realities. This series strives to highlight the contrast between the idyllic appearance of the Lommel’s Sahara and its underlying real toxicity.