Berlinde De Bruyckere, sculpture as exorcism

One of the main characteristics of Berlinde de Bruyckere’s sculptures is that they strike anyone facing them very hard. A second is that they are quite simple to describe, but can be understood in many different ways.

We experience one or the other of these qualities in each of the rooms of his Montpellier exhibition, the most considerable that he has had the opportunity to realize in France until today: around fifty pieces, including five new creations, and several series of drawings. It develops over three floors, according to a gradation from the least painful to the most cruel, up to a monumental installation that pushes expression to its climax. It is not a retrospective, but the deployment in the space of the rooms and the time of the journey of works that have been executed in the last two decades and are arranged in such a way as to respond to each other.

Berlinde De Bruyckere’s sculpture is brutal, often painful, heavy with innuendo and symbolism.

What is easy to define about them are the plastic means. After having practiced a late form of minimalism in the 1990s, Berlinde De Bruyckere, who was born in Ghent (Belgium) in 1964, abandoned metal and the right angle for materials with opposite qualities: wax, wood, blankets, animal skins, leathers and, sometimes, even furniture.

This is how the curved volumes, the colors, the folds and the knots, the variations in texture and the shades of coat of the naturalized horses that she sometimes uses have entered her sculpture. And so it comes, in the series Archangel – his most recent –, to modeling of immediately identifiable anatomical elements, legs and feet of pale and bluish wax that support standing figures that cannot be seen, because busts and heads disappear under long torn fabrics, such as mourners of medieval sculpture.

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This does not mean that the artist would have returned to a naturalistic sculpture of the human body as we have known it since the beginnings of this art, but that fragments of figuration now enter into composition with shreds of torn canvas, heaps of worn and faded fabrics, beams and planks.

The same is true of works on paper, in which anatomical elements, most often female and male sexual organs, are alternately or simultaneously drawn in pencil as if from nature in all their details and suggested by cut-outs, collages and overlays. Their chromatic tones, sanguine or ashy, accentuate the feeling of physical presence.

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