Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun (Spotlight)

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Like Red Hand, Green Hand, this exhibition is an unexpected, sometimes unwelcome, illumination of the different situations in which we similarly live. While the fire and (probable) cannibalism imply some sort of ritual, the works are most chilling as sketches of random violence, causal and instinctual. Michaël Borremans: The Advantage, the artist’s first museum solo show in Japan, was also on view in 2014 at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

Most recently, Michaël Borremans: Fixture, was presented at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in 2015-2016. The main theme depicts naked toddlers (like in the Renaissance with the putti) who seem to be in a very strange ritual. In 2010, he had a solo exhibition at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, as well as commissioned work on view at the Royal Palace in Brussels.As Bracewell further notes on these works, they portray psychological states that are not intended to be decoded: “the scenes depicted by the majority of paintings comprising Fire from the Sun show a state of being or society in which the primal is uncontrolled, without bearings, in a state of anarchy―the Id of Freudian primary process run riot, with no Ego to mediate between instinctual behavior and ‘reality.

The general opening was likewise packed—crammed, stuffed—no doubt with people from different starting points. That the painting had had an unintended and instinctive meaning signalled that “I had made a good work”, Borremans said. Each title in the Spotlight Series from David Zwirner Books features new work by a leading contemporary artist. From the outset the artist understood he was taking a risk with the new works, precisely because of their open relationship with interpretation. But even if the paintings deceptively represent a vacuum (lack of context, setting, explanation), they are not made in one.Like Red Hand, Green Hand, this exhibition has an intuitive relevance to the time in which it was created and the circumstances in which it first exhibited. A major museum survey, Michaël Borremans: As sweet as it gets, which included one hundred works from the past two decades, was on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 2014. These ghostly figments remind us of the artist’s hand (another detached extremity) and its control over what we see and what we don’t. Some of Borremans' paintings, such as Automat (I) (2008), feature figures with truncated torsos or dismembered limbs, further suggesting that these are figures trapped by a pervading sense of futility.

The art of Michaël Borremans seems always to have been predicated on a confluence of enigma, ambiguity, and painterly poetics―accosting beauty with strangeness; making historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign. Other venues which have hosted solo exhibitions include the kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2009); de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2007); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.

Embarking on a career as a painter relatively late, at the age of 33, Belgian artist Michaël Borremans initially trained as a draughtsman and engraver at Saint Lucas in Ghent. In some of the paintings the children are in the process of disappearing: phantom bodies not quite removed from their gruesome acts. From January 27 to March 10, Michaël Borremans, Belgian painter and filmmaker, will have his first solo show in Hong-Kong for the opening of the outpost of David Zwirner Gallery, Fire from the Sun.

Reminiscent of cherubs in Renaissance paintings, the toddlers appear as allegories of the human condition, their archetypal innocence contrasted with their suggested deviousness. Even the gestures and postures of the figures, with slouched shoulders and downcast faces, seem to indicate resignation, as if they had long ago accustomed themselves to the purgatory of their existence. The children are presented alone or in groups against a studio-like backdrop that negates time and space, while underlining the theatrical atmosphere and artifice that exists throughout Borremans’s recent work. The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, Fire from the Sun highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence.I heard other interpretations while there, and so did the artist: that the paintings examine the loss of innocence, that they are a caricature of original sin, that they meditate on hypocrisy, that they demonstrate human capacity to be at once good and evil. The previous year, Michaël Borremans: The Advantage, the artist’s first museum solo show in Japan, was on view at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Michaël Borremans combine horror and innocence in this young children, becoming allegories of the human condition. The image was widely interpreted as a symbol of Hungary’s political circumstance and even showed up on a large banner promoting the show.