Monday 23.11.2015

Miet Warlop & Nel Aerts exhibitions at KIOSK

KIOSK presents two new exhibitions with works by Miet Warlop (1978, BE) and Nel Aerts (1987, BE).

Both artists create universes that, in various guises and with different media, leave an immediate, poetic impression. Once immersed in them, the visitor will smile and grin at their ambiguous image worlds, before being left, moved and deserted.

Miet Warlop creates performances, actions and public interventions that stand midway between absurdist theatre and autonomous 'tableaux vivants'. Warlop creates a visual language in between theatre, dance, and exhibition and freely plays these disciplines off against each other.

Titled 'Crumbling Down the Circle of My Iconoclasm', Warlop's show at KIOSK presents an installation in which smaller spatial arrangements of objects, props, gestures and performers interact and set out an ever-changing choreography within an exhibition's set chronology. Like a contemporary iconoclast, Warlop takes over the dome room to visualize her interpretation of the Greek notions of 'eikon' (representation) and 'klastès' (breaker): a process of simultaneous creation and destruction.

In Warlop's visual universe, all elements are interconnected in an infinitely spinning loop of references that may take the form of a scratch on a record, a plaster cymbal, or a skirt-shaped object rolling in circles on the floor. The different objects are activated during brief interventions, unannounced temporary sculptural installations. The appearance of a new image inevitably coincides with the disappearance or crumbling of other images. Every action or movement adds a visual or auditory mark to the overall picture, resonating through and with the dome room.

Nel Aerts also freely and intuitively moves between different media such as painting, drawing, collage, performance, and sculpture. Over the last couple of years, a growing focus on the portrait can be discerned in her work, resulting on works on paper and wooden panels.

For the occasion of her show 'Billenkoek', Aerts has assembled a new, motley crowd of abstracted, posing subjects and characters that refer to popular culture, her immediate everyday surroundings and the artist herself. The (self) portraits are tragicomic in the contrasts they evoke. They can be sad or funny, extraverted or inward-looking, deliberately or playfully crawled out of the wood or arisen from the imagination as a drawing, but invariably they are introspective and unassuming.

A selection of older and new paintings, and a new series of about sixty drawings interact with the KIOSK spaces in a number of installation interventions. The impression one gets is that of a portrait gallery with walls, windows, and floor covered with autonomous pieces, making the drawn space and the exhibition space flow into each other.