Michaël Borremans - Coloured Cones
Zeno X Gallery is pleased to present Coloured Cones, the seventh solo exhibition of Michaël Borremans.
The title of the exhibition refers to the new series of paintings in which satin cones play the leading role. These are sometimes placed alone and sometimes side by side in different constellations. Both the manner of presentation and the choice of satin point to the tradition of Western portrait painting. By projecting the codes of the genre onto the soulless cone figures, a tension arises not only between subject and object, but also between reality and abstraction. The thorough individualization of the cones also led to two of them being given a real name: The Pope and Dodgy Bob. In The Pope, Borremans refers directly to the portrait of Innocent X by Diego Velázquez, in which the fabric of the robe acts as a pars pro toto for the character in one of the most famous portraits in Western art history.
Further in the exhibition, the colourful cones are confronted with ‘portraits’ of human figures that emerged in the same period. The shapes of the ‘cones’ resonate in the costumes in which his models are dressed. These images, too, challenge the expectations of what a portrait is supposed to be. After all, Borremans never paints the human figure as an individual, but always as a type. The portraits are not representations of nature, but point to something artificial, to the image of man that has arisen in our Western culture. Through these generic types he touches upon the fundamental theme of his work: the condition humaine. The result is a set of surprising representations that strike a compromise between portrait and still life, abstraction and concreteness, illusions that only exist in the reality of the painting.
(Represented by: Zeno X Gallery)