Wunderkammer: Babette Goossens

Every week, AGENDA goes in search of the sound and vision of Brussels. This time, we check out Babette Goossens, who, in her Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek studio, reveals some of the secrets of her vibrant, icon-like canvases.

With her delicate figure and pale complexion, Babette Goossens is one of those individuals who seem to barely exist. At least, that is, in day-to-day life. The everyday proves too one-dimensional, too narrow, for those souls brimming with a thousand and one images. Like the Indian-ink silhouettes-landscapes she will present in her exhibition at the Espace Blanche, this 24-year-old woman has an inexhaustible wealth of cultural baggage. Babette Goossens is someone who has decided not to get bogged down unnecessarily in life. Ask her about her favourite books and her response will simply be to mention the one she read most recently – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, as it happens. No sooner read than forgotten. “I am incapable of remembering my last weekend,” she explains. This vow of existential poverty is explained, one rapidly realises, by the fact that, with her, everything gives way to painting. For this graduate of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, painting isn’t a pose or a luxury; it isn’t a gift; it’s an absolute necessity. She observes: “Despite the precarious life that being an artist involves, it has always seemed the only possible way for me: the other possibilities – literature or journalism – scared me.” Anxiety and unease pervade her life. “When I was little, I took refuge in books. I did nothing else: I could read up to four in a day.”

Sleepyhead
So it comes as no surprise to learn that the revelation of painting came from a colour illustration in an encyclopaedia, of a work by Amedeo Modigliani. Without knowing it, Goossens found herself arriving on a new continent whose countries were painters, from Van Gogh to Klimt, via Egon Schiele. “At fourteen, I bought my first books of reproductions, published by Taschen. I didn’t read any of the text, but I leafed feverishly through the images.” Without her realising it perhaps, her life has since come to resemble a painting. Her face, for example, recalls that of Jeanne Hébuterne, as immortalised by Modigliani. There are other disconcerting details, such as a pair of clodhoppers, very much the worse for wear, lying about in her room – worn-out shoes that recall others painted by a Dutch painter who had an ear cut off.

The artist’s studio adjoins the room Goossens uses as a bedroom. “It used to be my sister’s room. As she has moved out, I’ve taken it over.” In it, one can see all the key works that will be on display in her forthcoming exhibition. Such as the series of paintings, “Les Endormis” (“The Sleepers” or “The Sleepyheads”), portraits of friends with their eyes closed. One inevitably sees here a connection between presence and absence, between figuration and abstraction. “I have always painted the people around me. A time came when I asked them to close their eyes, because I found it difficult to bear their gaze while I was painting. It’s not about taking control, but it serves as a kind of filter that allows me to defuse reality.”

We were particularly dazzled by Sommeil (Brigitte), a painting measuring 150 x 100 cm of a sleeping woman and her dog. The rug in the painting, with its shimmering gold, recalls Klimt or even Orthodox icons. It demonstrates an alchemy that transforms the mundane reality of a siesta into a moment of poetic contemplation. We were also struck by the recurrent aspects in this painter’s work: whether in terms of sanding or of applying successive layers, these canvases result from a real difficulty in letting a painting go. “There is a tension in what I do. When I start a painting, I try to define, but, at the same time, I try to ensure that what will be defined will not be too much so. I want the garish, fixed, even obscene aspect of a depiction to yield to the emotion that guided me towards it.”

Self-portrait on the ceiling
While one might not be too surprised at the multitude of postcards and photographs – of Gypsies and Native Americans, among other subjects, bearing witness to her attraction to what is fragile – on the walls of the studio, the drawing tacked to the ceiling is decidedly stranger. Our young artist has an explanation. Babette Goossens: “It’s a low-angle self-portrait that I made during a month-long stay in Montreal. I made it with the help of a little mirror. While I was there, even though it’s a city I love, there were some days I was incapable of going out. So I spent those days drawing. Ever since, that image, which is over my head while I’m working, has been like a memento, a sort of tutelary object whose message, perhaps, is that it is better to dream your life than to live it. But also that it’s better to start a project than to finish it. When I was a teenager, I was absolutely determined to succeed and to achieve something.”

Borough: Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek
Exhibition: “Babette Goossens, hiatus bégaiements”, 5/2 > 2/4, Espace Blanche, www.espaceblanche.be
Info: www.babettegoossens.com