In Partes Tres (Jean-Luc Mylayne, Jean-Pol Godart, Walter Swennen)
8 August – 3 October
www.mac-s.be
Walter Swennen sees
faces everywhere: sinister perversions of cartoon and stock characters,
faces almost indiscernible behind a scrawled web of biro lines. There are
also perfect sausages, the kind with both ends tied like candies, and hats –
fedoras paired with moustaches, policemen’s caps, Chinese sunhats and
crowns. A Flemish play on words in one of the drawings makes an analogy
between fine artists and artist cunts. Are these the outsider art scribbles
of out-of-control, schizoid patients, their unconscious spilt out onto
scraps of cheap paper? In fact, all 224 drawings are the work of an
ex-psychologist and painter, whose explorations of the dark and humorous
contents of his unconscious have resulted in an effusive practice of
doodling. Swennen, who has been throwing sketches and doodles into a
suitcase under his bed for years, has now made a selection for exhibition
and publication in a book – the hand-held format of which is far more
effective for such an assemblage.
In another room of this tripartite exhibition, the face of Christ, outlined
on a crude crucifix, looks like a cartoon version of Munch’s The Scream
(1893). This is the work of Jean-Pol Godart, a congenitally disabled artist,
whose vocation has been to ‘do God’. The 14 crucifixes attest to his
obsession and, though it is difficult to dissociate the work from the
biography of its author, the sculptures are nonetheless invested with a
powerfully affecting spirituality. The face drawn on the last cross in the
series bears an uncanny resemblance to Swennen’s doodles – themselves
deliberate regressions to pre-conscious modes of expression. Godart (the
name is perfect) arrives at a similar aesthetic through authentic
disability. The pairing begs the question, is there an underlying unity in
human aesthetic expression, or is there something disingenuous about
Swennen’s work?
In terms of obsession, the husband and wife
duo Mylayne are the most extreme. Their photographs are the result of often
months of patience, which only ever results in a single print. A scene is
lit, props, actors and vegetation are carefully positioned, and the correct
natural light and weather conditions waited for. The last item in the
equation is the bird, which the Mylaynes have singled out before the
scenographic preparations. They wait until it positions itself in the exact
location set out in their imaginary storyboards. The final images are subtle
orchestrations peppered with enigmatic signs: esoteric clues and colour
coding for those initiated into their practice.
Ellen Mara De Wachter