Summer Exhibitions: Stephan Balleux

(Stephan Balleux: Hold Everything Dear, 2010)

The Elsene/Ixelles artist Stephan Balleux has come full circle: he is back in his own borough in the Elsene/Ixelles Museum for a huge exhibition that covers ten years of work and has at its heart a gigantic picture installation specially created for the occasion. The starting point for Balleux’s works is always a photograph. And the final canvas often retains two of the photograph’s intrinsic characteristics: the black and white and a certain fuzziness. But the photograph, taken from the past, is reproduced and reworked in a way that blurs all points of reference. Balleux, as a virtuoso, may multiply one element and superimpose different scales; above all, he allows the paint itself – a formless form, almost alive, which he himself calls “the blob”, a reference to the cult film about a jelly-like all-devouring alien – to invade the image. The result is a fascinating “uncanniness” that emerges from elements as familiar as a face or a room.

• STEPHAN BALLEUX: THE PAINTING AND ITS DOUBLE > 14/9, Museum van Elsene/Musée d’Ixelles, www.museumofixelles.irisnet.be