Here we find James Ensor’s extrospective humour, with his way of distorting reality to better expose its flaws. His characters—often represented by testicles—much like the masks of Ostend, sneer at the world’s emptiness. But where Ensor screams, Baele also knows how to be silent, evoking a philosophy of the daily life where the arrangement of objects becomes a scene of profound mystery.

In this series, Casanova becomes a melancholic alter ego. Bart Baele does not paint the conquest, but the moment when the seducer finds himself alone before his mirror, stripped of his artifice. This is where the artist distinguishes himself, transforming the darkness of his thoughts into ironic material. His painted scenes are like confessions, and the colors used like scars.

Despite the heavy emotional weight, irony is never far away. Bart Baele finds amusement in his own torments and invites the viewer not to take despair at face value. The Casanova Paintings is an invitation to understand our own paradoxes: we are all, in some way, Casanovas of the mind, desperately seeking a beauty that eludes us, all while laughing at our own failures. A crude and beautifully human exhibition.

The spectator only recalls the parts kept in color in which Picasso is painting on a glass slab, he does not remember that the movie is mainly in black and white.

The exhibition The Real World is in black and white leads to the questioning of the notion of truth in color. A new found unity between night and day can be perceived.

The exhibition presents pieces from different artists working around black and around white, or using color in a way that unexpectedly, doesn’t give the spectator the immediate impression to be in front of color.

« 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 ».

The exhibition presents works by Bart Baele,  Yto Barrada, John Casey, Stéphane Couturier, Bouchra Khalili, Speedy Graphito, Laure Tixier, and Patrick Guns.

Born in 1969, the artist lives and works near Ghent.

Bart Baele’s work can be considered as a fragmented narration: each drawing, each painting, each sculpture records a moment of his life, like a confession revealing the artist’s bruised psyche. But it also harbours — and it is probably the reason for its highly contemporary obviousness — a mysterious component, a kind of idealism that combines suffering and redemption, which generates ever new questioning on the viewer’s side.

Practised almost obsessionally, Bart Baele uses drawing sometimes inspiring the subjects of his paintings. More direct and spontaneous than the painted work, his extremely varied drawings demonstrate a mix of frailty and affliction. The artist often represents himself, sometimes as a skeleton: referring to Ensor’s caustic masquerade of life and death.

Painting offers Bart Baele a wider emotional field. Reworked month after month, or even year after year, the paintings go over the same symbolic, religious and/or organic representations, which he dramatizes with soberness and violence. Bart Baele summons his inner torments as well as those of the rest of the world and transcribes them, as would the most responsive seismograph.