Galleries in Paris

The Situation of the Lamb

« No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built or invented except literally to get out of hell »

Antonin Artaud

The Belgian artist Bart Baele is exhibited once again at the Polaris Gallery. He offers us through thirty captivating and tormented paintings a universe, inhabited by his demons. The strength of his work is both in his palette, full of deep blacks and reds and in the symbolism of recurring patterns. His pain, pervasive, universal, imbues all his paintings and strikes the viewer by its sincerity, its spontaneity.

The imagery of Bart Baele consists of heterogeneous elements : crucifixes, reminiscences of his childhood catechism, skulls and needles that pierce the body, as if they were borrowed from voodoo culture, words in French or Flemish, scattered all over the canvas. The singularity of Bart Baele arises from this fusion of elements. The voice of the artist is like a scream, newborn’s scream to express that he lives, that he breathes, muffler scream of anguish from Munch’s painting. Baele’s characters are sometimes disembodied envelopes, already taken by the Grim Reaper, sometimes puppets of the artist’s own theater. Ghosts, masks, skeletons, lost children : there are a lot of frail silhouettes, frequently floating ones.

The title of the exhibition The Situation of the Lamb may ring a bell : we can think of the Agnus Dei by the Spanish master Francisco de Zurbarán. The sacrificial animal seems to allude to the artist himself, a sensitive and innocent being, wounded by the injustice of a cruel world. Beyond the suffering, one can perceive an attempt to redemption for himself, for humanity.

Dutch painter Constant seems to have grasped by anticipation Bart Baele’s process by writing : « a painting is not an assemblage of lines and colors, it is an animal, a night, a scream, a human being and all of that at the same time ».