A soft green glow in the evening red brings together works that, by means of weaves and light, colours and transparencies, aim at revealing invisible things. The exhibition, curated by Yann Chateigné Tytelman, was conceived as a conversation between two artists from different backgrounds: Lisbon-based Maria Appleton, an emerging figure of the Portuguese art map and a major artist and Belgian pivotal character Ann Veronica Janssens. The former mainly uses textile, layers of transparencies and opaqueness, dyeing, printing, superimpositions, in order to generate sensorial vibrations, optical and bodily experiences. The latter, composing with space and light, using glass, projections, translucid and filtering substances, is achieving as many subtle, spectacular, and unsettling effects of coloured impregnation and spatial dissolution.
Because of the evident contrast between the appearance of Maria Appleton’s handmade, composite and processual works and the look of Ann Veronica Janssens’ polished, « colder » and more industrial touch, this combination may look surprising. In fact, the artists’ practices are connected on several levels. Maria Appleton studied textile design at Chelsea College of Arts in London and started to experiment with fabrics through space, using light, movement and time in relation and tension with the built environment. It is in Polish artist Tapta’s « Soft sculpture » studio, formerly known as the textile department at La Cambre School of Art in Brussels, that Ann Veronica Janssens found a place where to experiment, across mediums, with movement and light. The act of weaving, would it be using thread or glass, fabric or space, opaque materials or ungraspable elements, is a technology. It is a device, that the artists are using, to work with the unseen, connecting with our sensing bodies, discretely revealing our perceiving capacities and our ability to connected to these ever-changing inner- and outer- spatial experiences.
The exhibition started with an image, the one of an artwork that would be able to capture, or more precisely that would be loaded by, and able to share, the intangible experience of the constant change of the atmosphere. The immensity and the depth of a blue sky; the luminosity and weight of a grey horizon. The impossible, fascinating nuances of transparent colours in the bright air; the luminescence of night light. The transformation of the colours of the sky when the sun rises; when it sets. A soft green glow in the evening red.
Maria Appleton (born in 1997) lives and works in Lisbon, PT. Appleton’s practice finds its material form in ongoing research of colour and form developed through multiple techniques of dyeing, weaving and printmaking. Her pieces unravel as chromatic in-prints onto a juxtaposition of layered cotton, silk and other industrial fabrics, defining a series of vibrant abstract transparencies. Appleton delves into the dialogue established through the interaction of bodies in space, two elements that endure in a constant symbiotic relationship of metamorphosis with light.
Speculating on the nature of liminal spaces, a stage of emotional or physical alienation, her production merges multiple layers of geometric codes that together create cartographic compositions connected to conscious spaces of collective memory. The artist negotiates tangible presence and symbolic absence in her compositions, meaning to trigger memories, dreams or physical sensations. Appleton chains, through these methods, a set of pulsing experiences, meant to trigger a part of a universe where the architecture of public and private meet.
Maria Appleton studied at Camberwell College of Arts and Chelsea College of Arts, London, UK. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Espacio Tacuarí (Vergez Collection), Buenos Aires, AR and Casa da Cerca, Almada, PT (2024); Hatch, Paris, FR (2023) and Galeria Foco, Lisbon, PT (2021). In 2022, she stayed at Cité International des Arts, with the support from Institut Français and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and in 2024, she was in residency at Fondation CAB in Brussels, BE.
Ann Veronica Janssens (born in 1956 in Folkestone, UK) lives and works in Brussels, BE. Since the late 1970s, the artist has developed an experimental work that emphasizes in situ installations and the use of very simple or intangible materials, such as light, sound or artificial fog. The observer is confronted with the perception of the “elusive” and a fleeting experience where it crosses the threshold of clear and controlled vision, it is an experience of loss of control, instability, fragility whether visual, physical, temporal or psychological.
Her work has been the subject of numerous institutional solo exhibitions, among which Grand Bal at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, IT (2023) and Hot Pink Turquoise at South London Gallery, London, UK; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, DK (2020); Museum De Pont, NL (2018); Museum Kiasma, FI; The Baltimore Museum of Art, USA; mars at Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne (2017); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, USA (2016). In 1999 she represented Belgium at the 45th Venice Biennale with Michel François, and her work was part of many other international biennials like the Sharjah Biennial 14, UAE (2019); the 18th biennale of Sydney, AUS (2012) and Manifesta 8, Murcia, SP (2011).
She collaborates with choreographers such as Pierre Droulers and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and is the author of several public commission for locations including Place des Plainpalais Geneva, Switzerland; the 12th Century chapel of St. Vincent of Grignan in France or the Korenmarkt, Ghent. She also created a site-specific work that has been installed at the Panthéon in Paris in 2022.
This exhibition is Maria Appleton’s first show in Belgium, and one of Ann Veronica Janssens’ few appearances in Brussels in the last 10 years.
A soft green glow in the evening red is a line from a poem by Christoph Friedrich (Fritz) Heinle (1894-1914) (translated from German by Rodney Livingstone).
The exhibition is curated by Yann Chateigné Tytelman.