Art Brussels 2025

Booth 5D-34

Brussels Expo, Belgium

24 – 27 Abril 2025

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils

Armanda Duarte

Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain
Céline Condorelli
Charbel-joseph H. Boutros
Daniel Blaufuks
Ignasi Aballí

Joana Escoval

GALERIA VERA CORTÊS is delighted to participate in this year’s edition of Art Brussels with new and recent works from the selection of artists.

ALEXANDRE FARTO AKA VHILS

 

 

Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto aka Vhils (b. 1987) 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. He began interacting with the urban environment through the practice of graffiti in the early 2000s. Peeling back the layers of our material culture like a modern-day urban archaeologist, Vhils reflects on the impact of urbanity, development and global homogenisation on landscapes and people’s identities. Destroying to create, he delivers powerful and poetic visual statements from materials the city rejects, humanising depressed areas with his poignant large-scale portraits.

 

 

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The ‘Strates Urbaine’ project, developed for the Orly metro station in Paris, was the leitmotiv for a broad body of work around the use and possibilities of traditional Portuguese tiles. The 34 metre-long mosaic that Vhils is presenting in Paris and for which the artist worked more than 4 years, allowed him to develop stencilled, embossed and carved techniques which translate his characteristic gesture and figures into this artisanal medium.

ARMANDA DUARTE

 

Armanda Duarte (Praia do Ribatejo, 1961), studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, in Lisbon, where she lives and works.

Armanda Duarte’s work is site-specific to such a degree that her proposals are actually determined by her observation and analysis of each given space. She observes the characteristics and details of each context in search of the essence which will lead the process of creation up to the work’s final reception. Her spatial poetics, which involve drawing, sculpture, installation and architecture, provoke subtle and intimate experiences.

Armanda’s stripped down, austere and delicate stagings result from the manipulation and composition of everyday objects such as stones, cutlery or tin can lids according to precise objectives such as measurement, balancing and replication. In her work, objects and simple gestures are subjected to almost scientific processes of repetition and systematisation that imply their conceptualisation, the definition of research criteria, and the normalisation of rigorous collection and editing procedures.

Armanda Duarte’s intense activity ultimately leads to an apparently unproductive, mute, discreet, at times almost imperceptible or even microscopic result.

 

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Each tin has the diameter and weight, in pigment, of an orange. The marks on this powder correspond to the stones that each of these oranges contained inside. The earth has the same provenance as the previous pieces.

Each drawing was constructed using a small stick that had been burnt in a domestic fireplace. At the time of drawing, it was placed as vertically as possible until it was almost completely worn away, until the two fingers holding it touched the sheet of paper. The three branches varied in length and diameter.

ANGELA DETANICO / RAFAEL LAIN

 

Angela Detanico (1974) and Rafael Lain (1973) are Brazilian artists living and working in Paris.

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain have been working together for nearly twenty years. They quickly established themselves within the international art scene thanks to their subtle questioning of the modes of conventional representation that surround us. Fascinated by what exceeds man and his understanding of the world, they draw systems of representation and writing of time, space, memory and the infinite from scientific, mathematical and literary research. Inherited from the conceptual statement, established in the use of new mediums of sound, graphic and plastic creation, their thought process appears in a meticulous, uncluttered and poetic formalism. Linguist/semiologist and graphic designer respectively, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain question the use of graphic signs in society.

 

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here and not, a particular moment or point, an instant, a place, a distance, a second away, an almost close, a breath, a blink, a note, gone, relatively, generally, about and around, playing summers, winters, autumns and springs, more or less high, less or more low, fast as a thought, still as a memory, shining as yesterday, bright as tomorrow, flowing as light,

An analemma is a record of the variation of the sun’s position in the sky over the course of a year. This movement describes the shape of an infinity in time and space. Based on this image, we have created a text that replaces the 365 dots in the sky with 365 characters in a poem that has no beginning or end, like the earth’s revolutions around the sun.

in the calendar, the characters in the poem follow one another in time like days.
the poem is read over the course of the year, as one day passes into the next.
the day and the month mark the date in this perpetual calendar.
the orange dot indicates the position of the sun on each date. it moves over the days, drawing the figure of the analemma in the sequence of time.

The design of the classic posters created by Josef Müller-Brockmann for the Musica Viva Festival in Zürich between the 1960s and 1970s is transformed with the circular characters of Helvetica Concentrated, created by the artists. The concentration of the surface of the letters in dots of ink translates the reading of the posters into a rhythmic experience.

Current show at the gallery

Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain

Jardim Infinito 

 

On view until 3 May, 2025

 

Check the Online Viewing Room

CÉLINE CONDORELLI

 

Céline Condorelli was born in Boulogne-Billancourt/Paris, France, and is a French-Italian-British artist, living and working in London (UK).

 

Céline Condorelli was the National Gallery’s 2023 Artist in Residence, London.

Condorelli has produced an extensive body of work that develops different possibilities for living and working together, exploring notions such as public space, the commons, institutions, property relations. Condorelli’s practice is committed to a continuous exploration of the less explicit elements that compose the structures through which individuals encounter the world — be they cultural, economic, material, social or political – the apparatuses of visibility that are often taken for granted, and which the artist describes as “support structures”.

 

 

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Céline Condorelli presents a site-specific installation that reimagines the entrance to the fair. Crossing this threshold mirrors the experience of stepping onto a theatrical stage. Through the use of curtains, Condorelli establishes a connection between arrival and the act of entering a scene—the bühne. Within this space, exhibitors and visitors enact their roles, negotiating their positions in relation to one another.

 

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After Work (2022) by Céline Condorelli and Ben Rivers is one of the selected films for The Screen. For the first edition of this curated program dedicated to video art, the artist will show a film that follows the construction of Tools for Imagination, a commissioned playground in South London, exploring the relationship between work and free-time, and highlighting the hidden labour that underpins the production of culture.

The work is intended to be viewed from Spatial Composition 13, a sculptural seating piece designed for museum settings. Drawing on the visual language of playground structures and (beach) loungers, it prompts viewers to consider how seating has shaped their physical experience of art and culture.

CHARBEL-JOSEPH H. BOUTROS 

 

 

Charbel-joseph H. Boutros was born in Lebanon in 1981 and lives and works between Beirut and Paris.

 

In his work invisibility is charged with intimate, geographical and historical layers; finding poetic lines that extend beyond the realm of existing speculations and realities. Being born in the middle of the Lebanese war, his art is not engaged in an explicit political and historical reflection, but is more accurately haunted by the said political and historical reflection.

For H. Boutros, each exhibition is a new geography that reformulates reality.

 

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3 phone numbers were dialed,
the telephone was left to ring only once on each of the 3 chosen numbers.
Exactly 7 seconds separated the 3 different rings.
The geographical position of the telephone was calculated accurately, so that each is on a different continent,
and all together they form a perfect invisible equilateral triangle.

 

 

 

The small white cube encloses inside of it a void of 1cm3 of darkness; this darkness is reflected to the infinite by mirrors covering all the interior surfaces of the cube.

DANIEL BLAUFUKS

 

 

Daniel Blaufuks has worked on the relationship between public and private memory, a constant theme of inquiry in his work as a visual artist, pursued chiefly through photography and video and presented in installations, books and films. In 2007, he published Sob Céus Estranhos (Tinta-da-china) – based on his film Under Strange Skies from 2002 – which earned him the award for best photography book of the year in the international category at PhotoEspaña.

 

His films – “expanded photographs” – have been shown at various film festivals and his latest works examine the resistance to German occupation in Brittany and colonialism in São Tomé and Príncipe.

 

 

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IGNASI ABALLÍ

 

Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the University of Barcelona, city where he lives and works. All of Ignasi Aballí’s work draws a challenge on the viewer’s perception. At the base of his work is the interest in showing that there are many things that we do not perceive with our eyes but that equally affect us. And that, just because we do not see them, does not mean that they are not there, but rather that these build on the semantic tension between what we see and what we do not: transparent or opaque images, which do not “show” anything, if anything they hide… The same happens with texts that only show fragments, partial explanations, abstractions.

 

 

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“The most effective strategy to reveal the rules of the game, to unveil its functioning, is to transgress them. A strategy that Ignasi Aballí applies systematically, in the most literal of senses. In this project he works as both a researcher and an alchemist. He has distilled the colors of a set of photographs until digitally fixing their midpoint on a monochrome surface. Then, with the utmost rigor and precision, through multiple trials, he has mixed the pigments to reproduce analogically the exact color, which he paints on a canvas whose proportions replicate those of the photograph. Yes, Aballí paints the image. Or his chromatic synthesis, apparently a silent image. The last step, not a minor one, is to give the caption text to the picture as a title. This produces a semantic collision. A gap opens up between what the word enunciates and what the image shows, or, in this case, omits. The receiver is forced to reconstruct, or intuit, a leap, to trace a process that is not visible. Peering into the gap, he is invited to ask himself what links what he sees to what he reads. Thus, as is always the case when literal reading is not possible, he is compelled to resort to poetic reading.”

 

– Antonio Monegal, Reading Handbook

Discover the Online Viewing Room of Cinzento/Grey/Gris, Ignasi Aballí’s solo exhibition at Galeria Vera Cortês, 2025

The work Monochrome in the Newspaper explores the relationship between an everyday object like the newspaper and its relationship with color. The newspaper is an object that focuses on current events, but it is filled with empty areas devoid of content. Some are fragments of the unprinted page, and others are colored fragments from advertisements or photographs.

 

The work shows nine monochrome fragments of different colors, placed in the same place on the page where they were originally located. The colored fragment shown is the maximum possible until another element (text or another part of the image) appears and disrupts the monochrome.

 

The format of each piece corresponds to the size of the open newspaper: a double-page spread, covered with a black matte cardboard that only displays the selected colored fragment.

 

The main idea of ​​the work is to displace the newspaper’s content toward some of its parts that contain no information, bringing it closer to chromaticity and, in some ways, also to painting.

 

The work is related to all the projects previously carried out (Lists, Calendars, Seas, Skies…), using the newspaper as a starting material.

JOANA ESCOVAL 

 

Joana Escoval (1982) lives and works in Lisbon. Her practice circumscribes both visual and aural in the form of sculpture, collective performance-promenades, video installations, painting and printed matter.

 

Joana Escoval’s works are passages, open-ended invisible paths exploring the transfer of energy. 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 objects. 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. Blurring the borders between unseen forces, such as wind and breath, and emphasising sound as a carrier. Escoval’s practice opens up a dialogue between the physical and metaphysical, encouraging reflection on our relationship with the unseen energy fields that connect us to everything around us beyond a western point-of-view.

 

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Don’t miss the upcoming show at the gallery with Joana Escoval

 

Opening 15 May