In the ban of Bam (part 2)

Despite the fact that the exhibition is already over, the program of the Festival BAM in my hometown La Roche-en-Ardenne still runs.

Doing research on another project and by looking at the video of the ‘Middle East Watch of the Year 2015,’ some sequences reminded me of the artworks of ‘ARCOFARC.’

Arnaud Crefcoeur alias ‘ARCOFARC,’ realizes digital paintings from photos. Each work is a graphic adventure. To know to what point you have to stop and to accept that something is born, is the challenge he faces every time. His slogan is: ‘What you see is not what you see.’

In Salalah, in the south of Oman, works on the road are a daily fact. By looking for another way out,  ‘Chantal Salustin’ came to my mind. Her engravings are based on maps from cities, from the countryside or even from the world. With the geometry of the maps and through ramification she tries to harmonize the oppositions between cities, countryside and continents, till she reaches a conceptual abstraction.

Like the women in Salalah try to create new designs of ceramic incense burners in different patinas, ‘Vincent Verly’ plays with several patinas on the sculptures he made. Although he wants to make them in bronze, his patinas also make them aesthetically appealing. Making sculptures – the third dimension – and being creative in the patinas challenges this sculptor and keep him everyday busy.

My travelling around Dhofar in the south of Oman inspires me in my creative work. In 2015, Thomas Corbisier traveled to Palermo, the capital of the Italian island of Sicily. The ‘Madonnas of Palermo’ became a project inspired by this trip. With the installation of several representations of the Madonna in the Saint Nicholas Church, one could not avoid the feeling that they were watching us passing. But if you take the time to stay still, to reflect, then the encounter becomes interesting.

Although Jacques V. Lemaire lived in Andalusia, his roots are in Ortho nearby La Roche-en-Ardenne. That’s where he creates as autodidact his abstract works. Abstraction to make things clear. To refer to nature, to colors, to our ancestors, even of paleolithic times….and perhaps that’s why, when you take the time for a close look to the paintings, you feel some where some how connected….by small lines, figures, scriptures…and colors….and then you go back to the whole picture….and to the background of Saint Nicholas Church.