Guglielmo Castelli, Ugo Giletta, Juul Kraijer, Barthelemy Toguo, Sandra Vasquez de la Horra & Tinus Vermeersch.

The work of the artists invited to exhibit in “Uncertainties/ Improbabilities” is particularly authentic and remarkable because the artists radically focus on freeing imagination, on contextualizing visual narratives of improbabilities and obscurities in far<reaching referentiality. The excessive, provocative intensity of the sensual, physical entity of visual creation functions as a subversive, liberating, anarchical and creative force that destroys the ostensible, seductive attractions of the empty, meaningless, superficial and manipulated simulacrum of the world. It deprives this banal spectacle of credibility, and intensifies the vivid, interrogating questioning of references and narrative sources.
Some of the artists refer – directly or indirectly – to preformed mythical, historical and conventional imagery, to archetypal, cultic, symbolic tales, to metaphorical narratives.

Juul Kraijer’s drawings embody evocations of dramatic and intriguing scenarios from Greek and Roman mythology as well as a melancholic and intellectual re<interpretation of Mannerism, or their destabilizing, irritating psychoanalytical appropriation, in which sophisticated cultural metaphors regain their primary, original, vital anthropological relevancy.

Tinus Vermeersch (gallery artist) operates in the art historian context of the Flemish Late Gothic, Renaissance and early Baroque, focusing on the permanent, irrational and destabilizing transfiguration of apparently banal motives from nature and everyday life, thereby creating subversive sensual metaphors of uncertainty and improbability. His subtle drawings and paintings open a hidden universe of small, almost invisible, unnoticed realities, which reveal tremendous, deeply disturbing, almost frightening perspectives of unlimited obscurity where irrational, inexplicable, unsolvable processes and forces are shaping our world. The horror of the unknown, the shock of the obscure, appear in a retarded, indirect, silent way so that the real confrontation with the shocking power of uncertainty enters our minds slowly, inevitably, unavoidably.

In a significantly different way, Ugo Giletta’s work reflects certain medieval and early modernist references, especially in his approach to a new – and intriguing, deeply confusing – interpretation of the sublime. These particular singularities do not have an owner, rather the singularities receive a visual entity, a raison d’être, a suggestive visual presence, without being representations of individuals, without being portraits of concrete persons.
Ugo Giletta presents the possibility of creating entities, which receive a visual identity without being persons with their own private particularity, as the crystallization of defined elements alongside undefined, frightening, depressing nothingness.

The excessive, highly sensual universe of Sandra Vasquez de la Horra reflects different elements of Latin American religious cultures and mythical imaginary, from Catholicism to Woodo, diverse black magic praxes and enhancements are mixed with psychoanalytical narratives, pathological scenes, thereby creating an extremely intense, suggestive, disturbing theater<like state of permanent obscurity. Violence and drastic sexual behavior, religious extremism and mystery of time and death, self<questioning curiosity and irrationalism melt together in this picturesque visual poetry.

Barthelemy Toguo’s robust creation embodies archaic cultural attitudes and old, deep<seated feelings of fear, insecurity and defenselessness as well, as a triumphal, excessive adoration of life and happiness, of sensual pleasure and fertility, in a certain ecstatic form of mythical unification of human and animal, of nature and culture, of darkness and lightness. The permanent transformation of human bodies into animals, plants into human bodies, objects into organic, living bodies manifests this elementary interpenetration of all existing beings and things, without searching for exact definitions or clear forms: the triumph of vivid, anarchic, fertile uncertainty.

An irresistible, vehement, irritating fluidity between the inner and the outside world, a destabilizing interpenetration of diverse elements of imaginary and material bodies, of spiritual realities and physical spaces, of organic, vivid, sensual bodies and inorganic, solid, rigid, sometimes even repressively hard forms, create an emotionally, highly intensive, even passionate scenario in the work of Guglielmo Castelli. The soft, velvety smooth, sometimes almost creamy surfaces of the irregular, undefined shapes somewhere between human or animal bodies and objects, plants, or architectural motives (walls, doors, windows, furniture) evoke a strange, obscure, unknown universe of improbabilities and uncertainties, where we feel invited, even involved, due to the sensual intensity of a provocative, unavoidable, psychologically intense intimacy. We feel inpropriated by the suggestive, poetically effective, highly sensual aura of this universe, while a feeling of destabilizing obscurity and alarming pathology provokes a certain inner<resistance and a dramatic questioning of the raison d’être of the whole scenario.

Lorand Hegyi was born in Budapest where he studied history, art history and aesthetics. During the 1980s he dedicated himself to curating contemporary art exhibitions while writing art historical and theoretical texts about Modernism and Post<Modernism.

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was invited to Austria, where from 1990 to 2001 he was director of the Ludwig Museum Vienna. There he created a major collection of central and eastern European art. In 1999, he curated the exhibition 50 Years of Art in Central Europe 194971999 (Vienna, Budapest, Southampton). In 2001, he opened the new contemporary art museum MUMOK, Vienna. In 2003, he was the art director of the Valencia Biennale and curated the exhibition Solares. From 2002 to 2006 he was art director of PAN, Napoli. From 2003 to 2016 he was director of the Museum of Modern Art of Saint<Etienne. In 2009 he was decorated with the Légion d’Honneur by France. In 2017, he was nominated to Art Director of The Parkview Museum Singapore where he created an important collection of contemporary Italian art. In 2017, he curated the show Anish Kapoor – My Red Homeland (Saint<Etienne) and the show The Artist’s Voice (Singapore).