One person

"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

Support Act : La clé de champs is the title of an exhibition consisting in an installation of numerous works on the walls of the space, coloured lights placed discreetely in the ceiling and a performance. It has been inaugurated just before the pandemic. 

The space, if not the scene, is defined by the mixed colored zones in the ceiling, by several metallic bars screwed in the walls, and by plates of glass, painted and covered by silkscreen prints. These plates are gathered in small groups, forming some compositions with photographs and drawings, suggesting silent stories. There are also prints on paper: some brief texts oveprinted on existing printed material, often political leaflets, creating caustic encounters between different registers of language : proverbs, poems, and propaganda. The metallic bars are usually hidden within the walls of buildings, to structure and support them. But here they look like urban relics, amplifying an atmosphere of cold urbanity.

Every work functions with layers, plays on conceptual or physical depths. It combines ideas, images, emotions in a theatrical way. The early experience in the world of comics could be traced in these works, in the way narration is engaged, though experimentaly. Many works contain characters, looking like puppets stucked in labyrinthic cities, so huge that they look like David against Goliath. It is the world-city, squeezing weak forms of life, with its inhumane dimension, its dry materials (glass, metal, concrete), the divisions it creates, its digital and abstract conception. Human being seems to err, to wander with no purposes in a city that he paradoxically conceived himself. Other characters are lost in solitary situations, silences, blindness, difficulties to communicate with others.

During the performance, made during the opening, someone wears a mask from Pierrot, a mischievous and sad character of the Commedia dell’arte. This person is seated in the center of the room, he doesn’t speak, and stares at his computer, apparently excluded from every conversations around. But, actually, one could see that he is writing on his computer, in real time, several types of contents in different languages : pieces of conversations that he hears, answers that he gives to visitors trying to enter in contact with him, personnal monologs. These words are projected in real time on top of one of the wall of the exhibition, as an additional layer, over the works. The artist is both present and absent; he seems to mimick the different personnalities of his charachters appearing in the silkscreen compositions. He is a figure both identified and anonymous, solitary and collective, operating almost like a prism, or a wizard, or a jester, trying to engage a form of catharsis, in the middle of a confused mob.

The performance organised at the MAMAC, Museum of Modern and Contemporary art from Nice, by Claire Migraine and her association Thankyouforcoming, concludes a week of residence in the area, with meetings of the different persons active in the field of visual arts. It developps itself in three phases. The first is a presentation, half humoristic, half serious of the “theory of Asterix and Obelix”, a reference to the famous comic book created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo where stereotypes about cultural imaginaries are approached. It is an attempt to sketch the collective imaginaries of given regions, where many artists seem to work often in a similar direction. The second phase is a projection of prepared groups of images showing works created by artists coming from a common area: here, Belgium, France, and the Nice region. In the last phase maps of the collective imaginaries are spread on the floor with stamped words describing the collective imaginaries in question, and coloured ropes to represent loose frontiers. Everything happening in the middle of the museum rooms, full of artworks and imaginaries, echoing the maps on the floors. 

Photographs : Alexandre Ansel, Claire Migraine