Galleries in Paris

All of Bart Baele’s new works, which will be exhibited from June 7 at the Polaris gallery is entitled : bad painter. This will be the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at Polaris Gallery. Bart Baele was born in 1969 and lives and works near Ghent.

Confirming over the years an intense pictorial expression, painting and drawing give to Bart Baele a very wide emotional territory.

Reworked over the months, even years, Bart Baele summons his inner torments as those of the rest of the world and transcribes them as the most sensitive seismographer would do.

Invoking his personal pantheon – Antonin Artaud, Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh, James Ensor, Niko Pirosmani…- Bart Baele uses them as (very) loud incantations, accentuating the tension between satire and drama, the pamphlet and the fable that runs through this fascinating work.

These quotations amplify an emotional charge from which the viewer cannot escape. The theatricality of existence takes on its full dimension here.

For it is indeed the theatre of life, whose main actors, coming from the artist’s life (imaginary?) are often represented by the animal genre, which can take the form of birds (good and innocent) or wolfs (evil). And if these animals are far from the personifications of La Fontaine, here they symbolize as much human suffering as hypocrisy and also and especially hope, that Bart Baele the artist seems to hold in humanity. This work which is shown to us brings an emotion in its raw state, as it rarely gave us to see.