Galleries in Paris

With his cynical way of denouncing the barbarous, absurd and tragic aspects of our human condition, for over twenty years Belgian artist Patrick Guns (1962, Brussels) has been producing art of which the political engagement is free from all ideology. Armed with dark humour and mobilized by a joyful bitterness, he looks upon the most serious historical or modern-day topics, such as war, capital punishment, colonialism, racism or clandestine immigration with a corrosive gaze that pulls back the sordid or pathetic varnish, in which the media often cover them, to reveal their tragic dimensions and make an appeal, not to our empathy, but to an examination of our conscience. Through word games, associations of ideas, and comparisons of images, his work nevertheless possesses the poetic quality necessary to go beyond morality and guilt. With this, the first monographic exhibition devoted to Patrick Guns by a Belgian museum, the MAC’s intends to reveal a body of work which has visibly been created in a globalised world where human civilisation and human life are not yet universal values. ( Text extract from his exhibition at MAC’S GRAND HORNU – Belgium – ) 2014