Dauwens & Beernaert Gallery

For "Faux en écriture", the Dauwens & Beernaert Gallery has selected work by artists from its own stable, with copying, counterfeiting, and language as the threads running through the exhibition.

Art and deceit are often closely related. The Dauwens & Beernaert Gallery is currently exploring this relationship in a group show, "Faux en écriture", which takes its title from the official term in French for forgery. Copying, counterfeiting, and language are the key terms that give the exhibition coherence.

Quinten Ingelaere, for example, employs a trompe l'oeil painting technique, with which he sets out to evoke marble. It's an idea that has been around for centuries and one, moreover, that we have seen executed with more virtuosity by his historical predecessors. We found Maxim Frank's trompe l'oeil more convincing: what looks like an empty scroll has actually been executed in plaster. Loïc Van Zeebroek also exhibits a virginally white work. He reworks a triptych, but overpaints it, so that only the form of the frame remains – kind of an easy move, in our opinion.

We preferred Laetitia De Chocqueuse's approach. Her starting point is the idea that, in the history of art, one could often only come into contact with certain works of art in the form of engravings. The engraving technique meant that the work in question was always executed as a mirror image, so that generations grew up with the "wrong" image. De Chocqueuse refers to this in an installation with a wooden panel and a mirror in which she reworks an authentic 18th-century engraving as a mirror-image painting.

Raffaella Crispino also bases herself on work from the past. During a residency in Jerusalem, she picked up some old 19th-century Iranian engravings. When she and the antiquary were chatting about the trade embargo with Iran, he said something that stayed with her: "Here no politics, no war, just simple stories" – words that Crispino uses as a caption for the illustrations. The work itself is not without merit, but it's a bit on the light side. Like most of the works in this exhibition, in fact.

Faux en écriture > 28/5, Dauwens & Beernaert Gallery