Cythera
Watteau's "The Embarkation of Cythera" does not function as a romantic idyll, but rather as an act without completion, a threshold where image, expectation, and projection guide one another.
Cythera marks that intermediate space, not a destination, but a protocol of viewing. It is not the arrival that is the idyll, but the manifestation of desire that sets the departure in motion: framing, selection, staging, the montage of fragments into a plausible fiction.
The title functions as a metalanguage for the exhibition: the image as a means of transport, the viewer as a passenger, utopia as an asymptote.
The result is not a comforting mythography, but a critical framework in which the visible and the missing modulate each other. The works of Van Lierop and Martyn operate at the intersection of document and staging, pseudo-documentary tactility versus excess and noise, and question how meaning arises through absence, excess or repetition.
Cynthera thus identifies an operational void: the interval in which the image legitimises itself and at the same time betrays its own fiction. What remains is not an arrival, but an audit of the gaze: what reality do we construct in order to persist in departure?
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Marilou van Lierop (°1957) was born in Hulst, The Netherlands. She lives and works in Antwerp (BE). Her work, mostly paintings but also videos and drawings, has been featured in various art galleries, exhibitions, and museums in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and the U.S. (New York & Los Angeles). Her work was included in various collections at home and abroad and shown at art fairs ArtBrussels, Art Rotterdam and The Solo Show in Rotterdam. Frank Taal Galerie represents Marilou van Lierop in Rotterdam.
Pieter Jan Martyn (1986, BE) lives and works in Avelgem. He obtained his master's degree in painting at Sint-Lucas in Ghent.
Martyn paints at the intersection of archive and imagination: pseudo-documentary reconstructions in which framing, omission and afterimage convey meaning.
His oeuvre, ranging from political-historical series on Nuremberg, the RAF and the Nijvel Gang to recent personal work, explores how images shape memory, loss and intergenerational trauma.
He paints in veiled, often opaque layers with traces of sanding and overwriting, so that the image both reveals and conceals.