Art Brussels 2023
20–23 April
Stand 5B40 – Brussels Expo
More info
Alexandre Farto aka Vhils
Carlos Bunga
Daniel Blaufuks
Gabriela Albergaria
Joana Escoval
João Louro
Susanne S. D. Themlitz

Galeria Vera Cortês, Art Brussels, 2023
Enquire
ALEXANDRE FARTO AKA VHILS
Portuguese visual artist Alexandre Farto aka Vhils has developed a unique visual language based on the removal of the surface layers of walls and other media with non-conventional tools and techniques, establishing symbolic reflections on identity, the relationship of interdependence between people and the surrounding environment, and life in contemporary urban societies, as well as the impact of development, the passage of time, and material transformation.
_ More info

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Whole Series #03, 2022. Hand-carved advertising posters. 100 x 70 cm. Unique
Enquire

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Whole Series #09, 2022. Hand-carved advertising posters. 100 x 70 cm. Unique
Enquire

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Scrape Series #09, 2022. Hand-carved advertising posters. 184 x 146 cm. Unique
Enquire

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Beam Series #18, 2021. Hand-carved advertising posters. 187 x 131 cm. Unique
Enquire
CARLOS BUNGA

Carlos Bunga, Alfombra #4, 2023. Latex and glue on rug. 191 x 290 x 5 cm. Unique
Enquire

Through the employment of mass-produced materials, Carlos Bunga establishes a dialogue with the existing architectural spaces resulting in ephemeral structures creating a double effect: to rethink our experience in relation with the space itself, as well as arousing the transient and delicate nature of urban structures.
_ More info
Starting from pictorial research, Bunga has developed a personal language that deconstructs the discipline of painting, hybridizing elements of sculpture, architecture, installation, video and performance. His expanded paintings slide across floors and walls; tensing the limits of the work, rethinking its supports and surfaces, spreading the works to other physical and conceptual places, and materializing in installation constructions that become performative spaces. His works, marked by a poetic approach to forms, are translated into geometric and abstract paintings, made by means of everyday materials such as cardboard sheets or adhesive tape, and sometimes introducing found natural elements: branches and leaves that intertwine and dilute in his compositions, integrating into a single material object that subtly leads us to question our own position in the world. — Sandra Guimarães
_ Performing Nature, Carlos Bunga’s solo exhibition at Bombas Gens, Valencia (Spain)

Carlos Bunga, Alfombra #15, 2023. Latex and glue on rug. 110 x 60 x 4 cm. Unique
Enquire

Carlos Bunga, Alfombra #10, 2023. Latex and glue on rug. 161 x 230 x 5 cm. Unique
Enquire
DANIEL BLAUFUKS
Daniel Blaufuks has been working on the relationship between public and private memory, one of the constant interrogations in his work as a visual artist. He has exhibited widely in museums, private galleries, and festivals and works mainly in photography and video, presenting his work through books, installations, and films. He holds a PhD from the University of Wales, where he wrote on photography and film in relation to the work of W.G. Sebald and Georges Perec, as well in relation to memory and the Holocaust. In 2016 he received the AICA Portugal award for the exhibitions Attempting Exhaustion and Léxico.
_ More info

Daniel Blaufuks, ASCENSION, 2023. Inkjet print on baryta paper. 160 x 110 cm. Ed. 3 + 2AP
Enquire

Daniel Blaufuks, THE SALVATION OF THE WORLD, 2023. Inkjet print on baryta paper. 120 x 16 cm. Ed. 3 + 2AP
Enquire
(…) They are copies without originals, images of what we have seen before, whether in reproduction, as here, or in the real world, they are déjà-vu, because today we’ve seen everything several times and what we didn’t see was because you didn’t want to see it or because it hasn’t happened yet. They are forcibly arrested images, the ice will never melt, and that is what still attracts me to photography as a medium, because despite being modern, its connection with the previous arts, painting and sculpture, is made by this immobility and silence, which do not seem to exist nowhere else, in a world where everything seems to be changing and in constant noise. Notice, everything here moves, except, no, the photographs will also move away soon, everything moves, I reinforce, except the images within the photographs, then there time was suspended for almost forever. Another paradox – the images inside the photographs, which are movable objects – like a text inside the book object, as if it wasn’t already enough that we are now seeing something I have seen earlier, my eyes in your eyes. But how to see the image beyond the photograph itself? Let us not forget, therefore, that, despite being static, all these reproductions have an instant of their own, that there is a before and after this moment of interruption, a photograph is nothing more than an interruption of the flow, a hiatus of breath, and a space around, beyond the limits of the frame, a fragment of space. There is here a clear distinction with drawing and painting, which only exist within their own frames, while photography extends beyond it. And it even has a sound, if we are willing to listen. Another paradox, listening to a photograph like someone who paints silence.
– Daniel Blaufuks
PANORAMA or the centre won’t hold, January 2023
GABRIELA ALBERGARIA

Gabriela Albergaria, Sementes da Amazónia #2, 2016 – 2019. Laser cuts on Heritage Woodfree Bookwhite 315 gsm paper and metal clips. 74 x 120 cm; 6 elements (74 x 19 cm / each). Ed. 3
Enquire

Gabriela Albergaria, Sementes da Amazónia #2, 2016 – 2019 (detail). Laser cuts on Heritage Woodfree Bookwhite 315 gsm paper and metal clips. 74 x 120 cm; 6 elements (74 x 19 cm / each). Ed. 3
Enquire
Gabriela Albergaria’s work involves one territory: Nature. A nature manipulated, planted, transported, set in hierarchy, catalogued, studied, felt and recalled through the ongoing exploration of gardens in photography, drawing and sculpture. The artist views gardens as elaborated constructs, representational systems and descriptive mechanisms that epitomize a set of fictional beliefs that are employed to represent the natural world. Gardens are also environments dedicated to leisure and study, cultural and social processes that produce a historical understanding of what is knowledge and what is pleasure.
More generally, the images of gardens and plant species employed by the artist are used as devices to reveal processes of cultural change through which visions of nature are produced. Mediated by representation systems they generate different versions of what we see as landscape—itself a complex system of material structures and visual hierarchies, cultural constructs that define the framing of our visual field.
_ More info

Gabriela Albergaria, What is the Color of Green #6, 2021. Colour pencil on paper (Heritage Woodfree Bookwhite 315gsm). 46 x 73 cm. Unique
Enquire

Gabriela Albergaria, #5, 2022. Linen cloth, cotton pillow case, cotton cloth. 82 x 56 cm. Unique
Enquire

Gabriela Albergaria, #3, 2022. Linen cloth, cotton pillow case, cotton cloth. 82 x 56 cm. Unique
Enquire

Gabriela Albergaria, Forests #05, 2023. Ink jet print on rag, colour pencil on paper (Heritage Woodfree Bookwhite 315gsm). 22 x 33 cm. Unique
Enquire

Galeria Vera Cortês, Art Brussels, 2023
Enquire
JOANA ESCOVAL

Joana Escoval, Hair Paintings I, 2023. Acrylic on linen. 2 x (23 x 14 x 2,5 cm). Unique
Enquire
Joana Escoval’s works are passages, open-ended invisible paths. The rhythm and fluidity of the elements she uses in her work are temporarily suspended in time, and will eventually follow their natural transition and transmission into other states of matter, keeping their new-found charges and vibrations from when they were sculptures. Whichever form they’re found in (mostly metals compounded or purified, mixed as alloys or mixed with other materials), these elements are charged with energies that unite beings and objects, the material and the spiritual. Escoval blurs the borders between what we are so used to calling “nature” and “culture,” and emphasises instead how everything is entangled and connected, seeing “nature” and its cycles beyond a western point-of-view—and most of all seeing it as something that is not separate from us.
_ More info

Joana Escoval, Wind gusts, 2021. Gold, parakeet feather. 38 x 48 x 38 cm. Unique
Enquire

Joana Escoval, Wind gusts, 2021 (detail). Gold, parakeet feather. 38 x 48 x 38 cm. Unique
Enquire

Joana Escoval, Pulse, 2023 (detail). Brass, hair. 36 x 48 x 14 cm. Unique
Enquire

Joana Escoval, Pulse, 2023. Brass, hair. 36 x 48 x 14 cm. Unique
Enquire
JOÃO LOURO
João Louro’s work descends from minimal and conceptual art, with special attention to avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. It draws out a topography of time, with references that are personal but mainly they are generational. With regular recourse to language as a source, as well as the written word, he seeks a review of the image in contemporary culture, starting out from a set of representations and symbols from the collective visual universe. Minimalism, conceptualism, Pop culture, structuralism and post-structuralism, authors such as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Georges Bataille and Blanchot as well as artists like Donald Judd and the ever-present Duchamp, form the reference lexical universe of the artist.
_ More info

João Louro, Blind Image #233 (The Entire HAL 9000 Dialogues #01), 2023. Acrylic on Arches 400g paper. 80,5 x 91,5 x 6 cm. Unique
Enquire

João Louro, From Left to Right #19, 2023. Acrylic and plexiglass. 173,5 x 181 x 6 cm. Unique
Enquire

João Louro, From Left to Right #20, 2023. Acrylic and plexiglass. 90,5 x 141 x 6 cm. Unique
Enquire
SUSANNE S. D. THEMLITZ
In Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s work, drawing is a practice intimately connected to the development of idiosyncratic mechanisms between thought and imagination, therefore, a medium that allows her to explore and feed processes of oddity. Each drawing assumes a cut with the exterior. The off-field doesn’t exist. Everything is inside, in this inner world, with its singular meteorology and with the unique capacity of gathering forces, energies and vibrations that distinguish it as a peculiar reality.
_ More info

Susanne S. D. Themlitz, O jardim Desdobrado ao Longo da Linha do Horizonte, 2021 (detail). Oil and graphite on canvas. 75 x 607 cm. Unique
Enquire

Susanne S. D. Themlitz, O jardim Desdobrado ao Longo da Linha do Horizonte, 2021 (detail). Oil and graphite on canvas. 75 x 607 cm. Unique
Enquire

Susanne S. D. Themlitz, O jardim Desdobrado ao Longo da Linha do Horizonte, 2021. Oil and graphite on canvas. 75 x 607 cm. Unique
Enquire

Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Flutuava, 2020. Oil and graphite on canvas. 100 x 140 cm
Enquire

Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Transcription. Drift. Dispersion, 2018. Acrylic paint, graphite, ink, colour crayons and watercolour on wood. 31 x 25 cm. Unique
Enquire
//
Current exhibition at GALERIA VERA CORTÊS:
I stood in the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar and I dropped my left tear in the Atlantic Ocean and my right tear in the Mediterranean Sea.
CHARBEL-JOSEPH H. BOUTROS
9 March – 29 April 2023
_ Online Viewing Room

Exhibition view: Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, I stood in the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar and I dropped my left tear in the Atlantic Ocean and my right tear in the Mediterranean Sea., Galeria Vera Cortês, 2023
Enquire