Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels
In his new exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery, Matthieu Ronsse presents an ensemble of new works which he produced simultaneously, and which were also installed for a short time in Male Castle (near Bruges). In his work, everything is mixed together: new wave music, paintings by old masters, snapshots, fashion photographs, his studio, earlier work … Together they form a fertile paint crust in which, time and again, the layerings of imagery and matter create surprising possibilities and new potentialities. While one work may blend in with its surroundings, another may very well cause a dissonant shock. The exhibition context itself can generate an extra layer of meaning to the work as well. The castle where the works briefly resided for example, was in the Middle Ages the scene of many noble intrigues, but also still bears traces of the woman’s abbey which was housed within its walls in the twentieth century. A building, like a painting, carries with it its laden past, even if this only becomes visible through the imagination. Courtliness and intrigue, memory and amnesia, the eternal and the ephemeral, they are all themes around which the work of Matthieu Ronsse unfolds.
Matthieu Ronsse’s paintings and installations can best be described as fragments of a painterly adventure in which experimentation and the pleasure of creating play a central role. As long as a work of art is in his hands, it remains subject to the creative process and is therefore never considered ‘finished’. Even during the exhibition, transformations always remain possible. The painting is at once the painter’s palette: it bears many traces of how the work was built up and reveals how chance and the constant search for solutions to keep the painting process exciting play a determining role. For Matthieu Ronsse, it is not the final image that is important, but the process that led to it. Every new layer of paint makes a previous one disappear into the fog of memory or oblivion. Experiencing the work of Matthieu Ronsse is therefore much more than just looking at a picture: it is a plunge into a creative process.
