Art Brussels 2018

With:
Eric Croes
Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel
Christophe Doucet
Vic Gentils
Piero Gilardi
Raymond Hains
Chris Hammerlein
Tadashi Kawabata
Tony Matelli
David Nash
Louise Nevelson
Richard Nonas
Stefan Rinck
Peter Schuyff
Josh Sperling
André Willequet

Solo Show:
Marlon Mullen

"It is in the nature of the water to moisten and to flow downward;
In that of the fire to burn and to rise in the air;
In that some wood to be bent and raised [] "

— Chinese philosophy " wxíng, 5 phases, IV century BC.

To cut, to sculpture the wood it is to call on to an ancestral and craft know-how.In the usual depart, this material accompanies the man since millenniums. He made his shelter, its means of transport, and its use connected to multiple practices everyday life and domestics, as often at the origin of the use of materials stemming from the nature. The artists by appropriating the wood, like revealing as with minerals where the metal, its natural structure, letting show through alternately the sapwood, the suber or the bark, whereas some other try to contort this natural material in relicat imitation of house, skeleton or summit or still, embody habits and customs or vernacular arts.

By using the wood, the man imagines the time. Anthropomorphics Sculpture forms in a substance itself living as a being, which preexists before the man and populates the Earth since millions of years, it is to confer her so the metaphor of his own passage in the material.

Some have an almost totemic or ritual relation, they "speak the wood", or still by splitting up it, by passing as the tiniest particle in the biggest trunk, reveal by this passage of scale the omnipresence and the greatness of this element

Others are going to use the wood in what it takes on in graphic interest: pattern, lines, knot, the wood is alive, it moves, deforms, is transformed and with him, its representation. Sometimes enactment or sequence, imitation or game, its drawing and its line make it recognizable beyond its own material.

Sorry We're Closed invites us to "Touch Wood" an exhibition conceived as a walk, a stroll around the wood and around the inexhaustible inspiration source for the artists since centuries.

Marlon Mullen bases his paintings on found photographic images mostly from lifestyle, news and contemporary art periodical's which the artist uses as a departure point for his subsequent work.
In the process of developing a painting Mullen's original magazine pages usually become obscured, or literally abstracted, where an image is subsequently reduced to a graphic schema of interlocking colors and forms. Very similar to the beats created for hip hop, operating at the threshold between legibility and illegibility Mullen's works lives within the multiple histories of 20th century modernism, while remaining highly personal.

Mullen is autistic or, put another way, he has autism spectrum disorder, and is for the most part non-verbal. It isn't entirely clear how much he can read in the same sense that you are reading this press release right now, but he certainly has his own understanding of meaning when it comes to words. Specifically regarding the content of his paintings, he has not verbally communicated at length his intent or fascination with the images that he copies. However, his paintings are sufficient in informing us of the nuances of what he sees.