Over the Top
Dauwens & Beernaert is pleased to present “Over the Top” an encounter of recent sculptures, collages and neon installations by Stanislas Lahaut (1979, lives and works in Ghent) and recent paintings by Quinten Ingelaere (1985, lives and works in Antwerp).
In their recent works, Stanislas Lahaut and Quinten direct their distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward observations of and engagements with, the construction of the image.
Stanislas Lahaut’s works draw upon everyday material culture, including found objects, consumer goods, and the (mechanisms behind) the art world. In addition to sculpture and installation art, his prodigious oeuvre includes collages, paintings and neon installations featuring seemingly very simple yet poetic texts. Stanislas Lahaut uses humour and playfulness as a strategy for broaching serious and essential matters. He gets the party going, but immediately shows the day after too.
Quinten Ingelaere’s recent paintings depict compositions of allegories and unconventional still lifes. Even though no direct narrative exists between the works, a common alienating atmosphere prevails. By adopting the imagery, strategies and techniques of old masters, the paintings of Quinten Ingelaere look seemingly very familiar upon first sight. Indeed, the paintings aim at a visual vocabulary and iconography that is rooted in our subconscious and our collective memory. All works make use of a learned and shared visual vocabulary. However, not a single composition can be reduced to a conventional still life; the alleged plants and animals are in fact amorphous / deformed structures that seem to operate in a parallel universe. Although the paintings of Quinten Ingelaere are essentially figurative they therefore also have a high degree of abstraction
