Couleurs Tendances
TaLe Art Gallery presents the group exhibition "Couleurs Tendances", in which five artists: Christophe Denys, Luc Vandervelde Lux, Ruth van Haren Noman, Tim Trenson and Wannes Lecompte engage in a visual dialogue about color and the power of abstraction. Each explores how these relate to composition, materiality and intuition, and how they create a field of tension within the work.
The title does not translate literally, but dissected into the words ‘tension’ (tension) and ‘danses’ (dancing) it reveals a deeper meaning. The tension is created by carefully weighing and combining colors into intriguing compositions. At the same time, the dance reflects the movement and vibration that brings color to life, like choreography unfolding across the canvas. Sometimes whispering and subtle, other times powerful and compelling.
Color here is more than an aesthetic; it is a language that resonates with emotions, memories and perceptions. In addition to color, the various degrees of abstraction take center stage in this exhibition. Whereas some works still contain subtle references to the visible world, in other artists these slowly fade into a play of lines and color planes, eventually approaching almost the monochrome. The figurative fades and gives way to a rhythmic interplay within the composition. Those who look longer discover a narrative that does not allow itself to be read immediately, but gradually unfolds in color and form.
- Han Decorte-
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THE LANGUAGE OF COLOR - by Yves Joris
Color needs no words. It resonates, vibrates, glides from canvas to canvas like a melody without beginning or end.
Christophe Denys seems to paint with the echoes of his memory. His compositions are rhythmic and saturated, balancing between chaos and harmony. Up close, the patterns pulsate in a visual cacophony, but take some distance and the whole finds its balance, like a musical cadence that only reveals its structure from afar. His works are not mere abstract canvases, but visual rhythms that reveal themselves only to those willing to look slowly.
Luc Vandervelde Lux approaches color as matter. His canvases breathe the texture of memories, of objects that have known another life. Wood, metal, rubber - his palette is not limited to pigments, but includes the sediment of the world itself. The tension between impermanence and reconstruction becomes tangible, as if the artworks contain the layering of time itself. Here color is not just an optical experience, but a material presence, a dialogue between what was and what could be.
With Ruth van Haren Noman, the brushstroke is as intuitive as it is poetic. Her paintings balance between figuration and abstraction, as if constantly wavering between recognition and mystery.She notes, sketches, memorializes-a process of emergence and disappearance, of making the intangible visible. Her work is like a dream that reveals itself only in the twilight of consciousness.Each canvas is a whisper, a memory slowly building up in layers of paint.
Tim Trenson, for his part, flirts with narrative and abstraction, and his canvases suggest worlds in which figures seem to emerge, only to dissolve again in a mash of color and movement.Here painting is not a fixed image, but a scene in a perpetual film. His paintings are like frames that tell a different story each time, without beginning or end.
The painting wants to be a painting!This credo has been at the heart of Wannes Lecompte's artistic practice for twenty years.His paintings emerge slowly, in a process of layer upon layer, in which he embraces chance and the void is as important as the color.Lecompte paints like a composer composes: rhythmic, thoughtful, with an eye for silence between notes.
His brushstrokes intertwine, alternating between control and spontaneity. The white space around the paint is not a void, but breathing space - a pause in a visual cadence that, like a drumbeat, resonates just as much in what is unsaid.
The echo of Matisse, Fauvism as rhythmic ancestor
Anyone who hears the word danse in relation to painting may unconsciously think of Henri Matisse. His iconic “La Danse” (1910) is more than a depiction of bodies in motion; it is a composition in which color and form reinforce each other into a pulsating whole. The vibrant blues, fiery reds and earthy oranges capture not only the movement of the dancers, but also the inner vibration of color itself.
Fauvism was not a style that sought to charm, but a revolt against the conventional use of color. The artists of “couleurs tendances” share this instinctive freedom. Not to simply provoke, but to give color back its inherent energy - to make it dance again, with the tension of experimentation and the ecstasy of the moment.
“The challenge of an unfinished symphony.”
Looking at these paintings is like listening to a piece of music that never really ends. Each canvas is a snapshot, a fragment in a larger process of becoming and disappearing.And so “couleurs tendances” leaves us with a paradox.The exhibition ends, but the paintings continue to resonate. The colors do not disappear when you leave the gallery; they nestle in the memory, like sounds that continue to resonate long after the last note has been played.Because in the dance of color and tension, in the rhythm of abstraction, there is always a promise of something new.Of a next movement, a next nuance, a next step in the incessant choreography of looking.
- Text: Yves Joris-