One person

For the second version of the exhibition curated by Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, dedicated to transmission, education, we pay interest to details of primary school archives, from the 1990's. Exercices, notes by the teachers in the margin of copies, monumental texts on childhood (Le Petit Prince, from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, or a poem  by Rimbaud), creativity of the children facing the indications given by the teachers... Written traces produced in the framework of the school express two visions of the world, from the children on one side, from the adults on the other side. Both try to understand each other, in often comic confrontations. The teacher tries to speak the language of the child, the child does his/her best to imitate the language of adults. Everything happens in a funny mix of good will, ingenuity, naivity, morality, and misunderstandings. 

My first idea for the title of this exhibition was "Let's be realists!", in an almost ecstatic, almost hysterical reference to Emile Zola, Emmanuel Macron, La Repubblica... But later, while I was browsing through the amazing creative production of my fellow artist Osanne Gevart, of 6 years old, whom I had invited to participate in this exhibition with me as a duo, I stopped in front of a drawing, or maybe two drawings, made on the double page of a notebook. The lower part of this diptych represented, she told me, an ice cream vendor. While the upper part evoked the world, even an onion. I found myself taken of enthusiasm! It was there the realism! I immediately injected myself two doses of it. I mean: I immediately ordered two scoops. With already a contained desire for a third.

"The art center Le Delta welcomes this summer a new installation made by Yoann Van Parys (1981). Coming from drawing, comics, then photography and art writing, the artist constantly questions the image's mechanism, through a work on its materiality, fragmentation, associations. Despite his colourful aesthetic and humor (which should alert the public about the part of derision always present in the observation he makes of his contemporaries and their behaviors), the installation of Yoann Van Parys seems to hold a melancholic dimension, almost elegiac. Roma, the name of a city so famous and so intensely repeated inside the exhibition space, transparent, but closed to the public, remains irremediably unattainable. Idyllic country, hard to reach during the pandemic times; old promise land for european artists; symbol of a golden age perhaps gone for ever... There is a substitution in the installation between this city, its imaginary, and other images, more futile, superficial, found during strolls through Namur, that seem to operate like palliatives to travel : shops windows where are our so-called wealths, mannequins in plastic similar to antique statues corresponding to perfect beauty canons, construction sites that dresses up like future ruins, old local monuments, ersatz of exotic vegetations in pots, canals on which sail some tired barges.

So many frivolous objects and activities that resonate like the fake promises of an access to what is far away and authentic. « Fly away » says an ad, photographed in the city center. While, in the closed window space of Le Delta, the different layers of images overlap, getting more opaque, and hiding inexorably Rome, taking perfidiously its place."

Anaël Lejeune

"Agents  of  change  in  social  sciences  are  defined  as  individuals  who  promote  and enable change to happen within a group or organization. Some natural and artificial agents  that  contribute  to  climate  change and to local or global, pervasive phenomena can  be  identified  with  the  same  phrase. People working with a bottom-up approach to  encourage  systemic  change  through actionable,  tangible  improvements  to these polluting situations are also agents of change. This exhibition attempts to identify and display a number of manifestations of apparently insignificant elements, actions, factors,  and  individuals  that  have  led  or could lead to exponentially greater effects. The artworks can then tackle social issues, environmental  challenges,  or  even  very personal inner realities."

Works exhibited in the context of this exhibition : Manifeste du pessimisme, 2021 (The Manifest of Pessimism) & Manifeste de l'optimisme, 2021 (The Manifest of Optimism)

I have two words for you.

« Over the hours, days, weeks, seasons, you let go of everything, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with almost, at times, a sort of intoxication, that you are free, that nothing weighs you down, pleases you, or displeases you. You find, in this life without wear and without another thrill. May those suspended moments brought to you by cards or certain noises, certain shows that you give yourself, an almost perfect, fascinating happiness, sometimes swollen with new emotions. You know total rest, you are, at all times, spared, protected. You live in a blessed parenthesis, in a void full of promises and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist: continuation of hours, continuation of days, the passage of the seasons, the passage of time, you survive, without joy and without sadness, without future and without past, like that, simply, obviously, like a drop of water that pearls at the tap of a water station on a landing, like six socks soaked in a basin of pink plastic, like a fly or like an oyster, like a cow, like a snail, like a child or like an old man, like a rat. » 

Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort, 1967