Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Berlinde De Bruyckere at S.M.A.K.

Berlinde De Bruyckere at S.M.A.K.
(link)

Francis Bacon in Apple design pallor, the material image of death. Torturing history to wrest meaning from referents, Anselm Kiefer found lead the go-to material for the weighty depiction of historic emotion, before killing it with its programmatic deployment ad nauseum, finally solved the alchemist’s puzzle, exchanging leaden trauma for gold. De Bruyckere finds too a material of contemporary nostalgia, like Greek temple's purity of whiteness, the unnaturally cold wax a paragon of cleanliness through its color bled out, lost.