Birthday

Brice Guilbert grew up on the French Indian Ocean island of La Réunion, at the foot of the Piton de la Fournaise volcano. The Fournez series is the result of years of repeated work on the very same motif: the eruption of this volcano.

Using only one proportion and five different canvas sizes, Guilbert's gaze focuses on repetition and composition bordering on abstraction, with an ineffable subconscious undertone and a strong rhythmic interest. All the works are painted on paper or wood using oil sticks made with the artist's own artisanal mixture of oil paint and natural beeswax. This book brings together a selection of one hundred works produced between 2016 and 2023, as well as ten songs written and composed by the artist in Kréyol Rényoné (Reunionese Creole).

Brice Guilbert (born 1979 in Montpellier), artist and musician, lives and works in Brussels, after growing up on Reunion Island in the town of Saint-Joseph. Since 2012, he has been exhibiting paintings and drawings often set to music. He has been painting erupting volcanoes since 2016.

One Big Bang brings together 78 charcoal and pastel drawings from Adel Abdessemed's recent series Nature Morte and Politics of Drawing, where everyday objects, animals, and flowers are subtly charged with tension. Through these works, Abdessemed explores the intersections of beauty, fragility, and unrest. With texts by Hélène Cixous and David Elliott, One Big Bang offers a thoughtful entry into an artist's visual language shaped by memory, myth, and political urgency.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Projeckt Brussels in 2024.

Adel Abdessemed (born 1971 in Constantine, Algeria, lives and works in Paris and Berlin) deconstructs identity codes, tackling head-on the tensions that permeate our society. His works, with their typical simplicity—sculptural installations, drawings, photographs, videos and performances—echo precise facts and familiar situations, but go beyond narrative commentary and militant criticism. Adel Abdessemed questions, among other things, the social and economic status of the artist in a system where his foothold is slight, by shrewdly keeping a distance in a gesture of subversive and committed resignation.

Abdessemed refuses to be limited to a single ideology. In his early works he passionately tackled religious, sexual, and taboos subjects and his later exhibitions have often focused on the theme of global violence. In an interview with Elisabeth Lebovici he stated, "I do not live between two cultures. I am not a postcolonial artist. I am not working on the scar and am not mending anything. I am just a detector … In the public sphere, I use passion and rage. Nothing else. I don't do illusions."

Sometimes reduced to a simple word, as in "Mohammedkarlpolpot" (1999), a condensation of names evoking totalitarism and religion, and sometimes complex and monumental installations such as "Habibi" (2004), a suspended skeleton of 17 meters propelled by a jet engine, Abdessemed's practice belongs to a new generation of artists who appeared recently on the French art scene, looking to offer another perspective on culture and identity.

There are countless ways to interpret death, and The Jacuzzi of Despair does not aim to add to them. Instead, it fizzes, swirls, weeps, and sweeps—an unsettled current of images and arrangements, placing Sharon Van Overmeiren's sculptures within a strange narrative of mortality and rebirth. Born from a collaboration with graphic designer Nana Esi, the publication refracts Sharon's work through a series of familiar yet elusive aesthetic mechanisms: from the speculative and ritualistic to the archival and surreal, from the encyclopaedic urge to categorise, to the spectacle of commercial catchphrases. As such, The Jacuzzi of Despair navigates and distorts the symbolic structures by which we typically frame life and death, suggesting a new order wherein their ineffable dimensions do not stand apart but fold seamlessly into one another. What emerges is a disorienting artifact, a publication both buoyant and weighty, performing a slippery, playful, and evocative attempt to grasp the mechanisms by which we make sense of life—only to dissolve them into incoherence, creating the conditions for new meanings to take root.

Published on the occasion occasion at Cultuurhuis De Warande, Turnhout, in 2025.

Sharon Van Overmeiren (born 1985, lives and works in Belgium) makes, in her own words, "fictional sculptures". She finds it difficult to qualify them as fully autonomous pieces, given that at any moment they may cease to exist in their current form of presentation. On a second level, this choice of wording refers to how she lends a voice to her sculptures; by providing them with a scenario based on found stories, taken from life or literature, combined with her own sense of how we are out of touch with the multiple objects that surround us. The sculptures make their appearance as "props" in a composition, installation or drawing, or as protagonists of a video or audio piece. In no small part, these works deal with the growing inability of the human mind to describe and experience "things" beyond its own desires.

as the non-world falls away is set of fragmented poetic compositions, created through iPhone scans of the artists notebook that have then been worked over digitally, testing the boundaries between image and text in a palimpsestic manner

WITHOUT THE E is a series of pamphlets responding to a presence or an absence felt in contemporary digital culture.

4 poèmes-affiches, format A3, impriméx en risographie au studio Colorama (Berlin), sur papiers variés, tirage à 150 exemplaires

«GASOLINE, Apocalypse 1998», «the category is: phone sex», «zona nudista», «(fête) sentimental-e-s» : étés d'apocalypse, émojis banane, cruising transocéanique, SMS en short, sales coeurs, baraques à frissons et grand-huit sentimental... ces poèmes courent toustes ~ à genoux, à nu ou en solex ~ après la question du désir, après l'amour aussi, avec une tendre obsession

Design graphique signé Auriane Preud’homme, Enz@ Le Garrec, Roxanne Maillet & Martha Salimbeni, avec des dessins de Gaëlle Loth

Nel Aerts (b. 1987) moves in a freely, intuitive way between different media as painting, drawing, collage, performance and sculpture. Since a few years she focuses more often on the portrait-genre, which she visualises on paper or on wooden panels, with careful attention to the different qualities of each material. As such, she is creating a large collection (family almost) of posing subjects caught between abstract patterns and hard-edged figuration. The figures she portraits refer to both popular culture and her direct, everyday surroundings.

The self-portraits are tragicomic in the sense of the contrasts they evoke. Alternately they are desperate or funny, extra- or introverted, thought- or playful carved from wood or originated as a collage, but they are always introspective and self-relativistic.

In Hundred Zundert, “Nel Aerts evokes a visual rendezvous with Vincent van Gogh and sets the tone for the near one hundred drawings that would be made during her three-month residency at the Van Gogh House in Zundert. Rather than ‘following in the footsteps of Van Gogh’, Aerts is interested in examining the mud and earth around them by (literally) placing herself in the environment of Van Gogh’s youth. The resulting work is characterised by a deceptive interplay between formal simplicity and playfulness which belies a substantial complexity. (…) Nel Aerts’s working process is uncomplicated and free of any pretension: black ball pen (dozens), sheets of white A4 paper (hundreds) and spontaneous, almost naive line work (in seemingly infinite supply) are the building blocks of a story that is nevertheless rich in visual and intimate detail, a story that teeters between seriousness and playfulness, at once both comical and deeply emotive.” From: ‘Portrait of the Artist’, Grete Simkuté, in: Hundred Zundert.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 18th issue, “Recto Verso” is edited by Will Holder, and had its beginnings in prosody, the measure of language, geometry, and a notion of imagist transcription, even. A two-dimensional exercise, it turns out, on paper. Words were tuned out, in favour of the volume of values our bodies exchanged: “the historical and bodily movement of language amongst subjects.” Attentions turned—taking (the measure of) classes in body language: the non-verbal: the insinuated: the reverse-side of image: the backside, and, oddly: Oh no: we don’t speak about that—to the next page…

Gabriel Abrantes has been making a career in cinema; with numerous international exhibitions, he's been keeping prolific, with video installations, drawing, painting, and now also VR. This book, published by maat and Mousse, attests exactly this. A book that is predominantly visual and clearly structured, efficient in transposing a certain formal and conceptual attitude that runs through Abrantes's work into the book's aesthetic approach, expressing humour and irony visually within a relatively classical framework.

"The juxtaposition of references to art and cultural history with personal and socio-political commentary is a guiding thread throughout Programmed Melancholy." writes Emily Butler, in one of the essays included in this book (other texts are an interview with the artist and short essay by Rosa Lleó). Butler continues: "His works engage with our emotions, with a range of personal feelings, often humorous, potentially rousing ethical and political beliefs. Unstable, multi-faced, polysexual, his characters waver between expressing personal emotions and wider social, environmental and political concerns."