Through fifteen fascinating and tortured paintings, he delivers to us the universe populated by his demons. The strength of his work lies both in his palette in the symbolism of recurring motifs.  His pain, mixed with a bitter humor, is omnipresent, universal, and impregnates each of his paintings with a sincerity and a disconcerting spontaneity.

Bart Baele’s imagery is composed of heterogeneous and often recurring elements: crucifixes, reminiscent of the catechism of his childhood, skulls, testicles that fly into the air under the title of Victory of French or Flamish words, thrown on the canvas. Invoking his personal pantheon – Antonin Artaud, Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh, James Ensor, Niko Pirosmani… Bart Baele quotes and uses them as a kind of incantation made out loud, accentuating the tension between satire and drama, pamphlet and fable, which runs throughout this fascinating work.  These quotations amplify an emotional charge from which the spectator cannot escape. The theatricality of existence takes here all its extent.

The Dutch painter Constant seems to have grasped Bart Baele’s approach by anticipation when he wrote: « a painting is not an assembly of lines and colors; it is an animal, a night, a cry, a human being, and all of that at the same time. »

The artist’s voice is like this cry, signifying that the artist exists and breathes, a silent but also ironic cry of anxiety.

The characters that populate his works are sometimes disembodied envelopes, already mowed down by death, sometimes puppets from Baele’s personal theater.

Ghosts, masks, skeletons, lost children: so many frail, often floating silhouettes. Referring to his life, but especially to his daily reflections on the place of man in humankind, Bart Baele draws a pessimistic portrait, but filled with the humor of Belgian artists.

If Bart Baele manages to take the necessary distance to this affliction that represents for him the contemporary life and the art of today, he does not translate less in his work, the strong feelings on this human nature.

Each painting is for him a scar of life.

Gaétan Vaguelsy,
Memento Vitae
curated by Smyrne-Lydie Delmas from July 6 to 30, 2022
A 2019 graduate of the Montpellier School of Fine Arts, Gaetan Vaguelsy now lives and works in Sète. Originally from Ile-de-France, he stopped his studies in high school, and began his wandering in the street. Embraced by this universe, he starts the  » graf  » with his group of childhood friends, his so-called crew. Not attached to the notion of « street art », he first practices graffiti vandalism as an extreme sport, without taking into account the viewer’s gaze but only that of his pairs. It is on trains, walls, subways that he sprays his name or blaze with the members of his crew, his band or his team. The first questionings settle, if the graffiti is an outlet then the painting is saving. He gradually leaves his daily life of wild city painting to integrate, by dint of determination, the Fine Arts of Montpellier. His training begins and his objective is to pay tribute to the graffiti culture. It is at this moment that his pictorial work starts to build itself around the mixture of cultures and symbols. The first intention being not to propose a copy of graffiti in a gallery, but rather to honor the cultures of the street through the white-cube.
He expands his theme and subjects to paint a plural youth around common ideas: joy, freshness and doubts. Through Gaetan Vaguelsy’s hyper-realistic work, the naturalness of a youth full of promise and vitality bursts onto the canvas where everything is possible, codes are broken. He narrates and tells a situation or rather a station, a stage of life, a singular moment. The birth of a child who is dear to us, like that of the child adored by The Three Wise Men (2021). The young Osama Elha, rearing his Yahama 250 YZ, (The Rider with a Rose, 2022) taking a posture reminiscent of Bonaparte on his horse, in an ego-trip by Jacques-Louis David. Nothing is imagined, everything is pictured. It is his daily life that is painted. The usual gestures left to chance are here sublimated. The common becomes sacred.
Gaetan Vaguelsy beyond the painter becomes the poet, beyond a remarkably precise technique, he gives to see a new vision of « his » world. The supporters-ultras, the vandal bikers in motocross without helmets on a highway, or the young people in tracksuits tri-band, are invited to the debate of the contemporary painting in the manner of the old masters. Tracksuits, bobs, sneakers painted in oil on linen canvas, are combined with lilies and columbine. They are the new codes that speak to young people of all social classes. These are the attributes and ornaments that embody the symbols of purity, royalty, power and pleasure. This is where the poetry of hyperrealism operates in his work.

Two series will be presented on the occasion of Harald Fernagu’s new exhibition at the Polaris Gallery:

As we go along

Harald Fernagu worked fromt photographic documents of buildings from the 1970s in Moldova and Tajikistan. As these buildings were abandoned by the public authorities, their balconies were annexed by the inhabitants who, with the help of disparate salvaged windows, built new spaces to enlarge their flats. Without any consultation, this collective bricolage follows the lines of the building, respects the shape of the balconies and by repeated modules – the windows – amplifies the rhythms of verticality and horizontality.

By becoming the architects of their daily lives, these inhabitants challenge the authority of the imposing building, like small domestic revolutions. In the series As we go along, thanks to the game of scale that the model enables, using only recycled material, Harald Fernagu builds the architectural manifesto of these popular revolutions where the walls seem more inhabited than the spaces they design.

Contrast is undoubtedly the element that most allows the artist to experience reality. He is in perpetual search of the otherness of the spaces and people he meets. What questions him, a contradiction, an anachronism, all these micro resistances to rules and customs appeal to him. They force him to perfect his language, to question his knowledge.

From these experiences Harald Fernagu constructs forms, sculptures, and sometimes images that are themselves bearers of otherness. He tries to build a reality from this by creating a possible sharing of the experience of the other with the other.

To this new series, Harald Fernagu has decided to add, for the first time at the Galerie Polaris, a series of photographs made with the companions of Emmaüs. Noting that people suffering from social exclusion are as much prisoners of their social status as of the imagery commonly produced around their faces, Harald Fernagu decided to deconstruct this « imagery » by making a photographic work with them, using their humour and prejudices as props.