Femmy Otten’s (b. 1981, Amsterdam, the Netherlands – lives and works in The Hague, the Netherlands) hybrid world of inspiration ranges from classical sculptures and Medieval portraits to outsider art and contemporary visual art. While she almost always refers to something classic, she bends all of these influences to create a precise, sensuous iconography that exudes a timeless quality. Her plaster, marble, and wood sculptures, drawings, painted wall reliefs, and spatial installations all attest to a desire to transcend transience.
In her mystical universe, this frequently results in enigmatic creatures with elements of naked people, fantastic animals, and seascapes. There are lovers who are merging, introverted women, and perfectly painted or sculpted body parts, totems, horses, tears, waving hair, eyes, noses, and breasts. As if the plot of a fairy tale had been shook and twisted. People who are important to the artist’s life are also represented in her work. Her art is autobiographical, portraying herself and her friends and family, yet transcending the personal to express a classical, universal value.
Her work is also distinguished by her craftsmanship. Femmy Otten is an artist who looks and keeps on looking, refines, and eventually captures something you’d could call intimacy. She, in a sense, conquers the image’s right to exist through a prolonged, laborious process, arriving at the essence of what she’s trying to communicate. The artist’s intentions are conveyed through the minimal image; a certain beauty that doesn’t need to be completely perfect. Her oeuvre bears witness to a timeless slowing down as a soothing layer on today’s fast-paced visual culture’s surface.
Lucy + Jorge Orta (Lucy: b. 1966, Sutton Coldfield, UK, and Jorge: b. 1953, Rosario, Argentina) have been committed to environmental and ecological issues since the 1990s, based in Les Moulins, near Paris in France, and London in England. In their visual arts practice, they explore the relationship between the individual body and community structures, where co-creation and inclusion are no exception. They inspire and unify viewers to engage on issues like water, climate, migration, and food diversity through involvement and empathy.
Their oeuvre is very diverse and revolves around these social-cultural concerns in an optimistic, sometimes even utopian manner. Through art and installations, they touch on the common good, pay attention to people and nature, and employ symbolism to create beautiful new worlds. They work on numerous projects at the same time, using media such as sculpture, painting, photography, performance, and film for their long-term meta-projects such as Body Architecture, OrtaWater, Antarctica or Amazonia.
The Ortas invite everyone to embrace humanity’s poetic side, while also encouraging us to inhabit the world with kindness, respect, and generosity. For example, Lucy Orta has created portable and autonomous living units that reflect on issues of mobility and human survival. And in the Light Works series, Jorge Orta used light to write encoded images on landscapes and culturally significant locations around the world. For them, the public space is by definition a communal space, where art can connect and resonate with its immediate surroundings.
Sculptor Filip Vervaet (b. 1977, Mechelen, Belgium – lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium) has formed his own eclectic language that merges disparate materials and techniques, as well as abstract and figurative aspects. He frequently works with traditional materials such as bronze and glass, and combines them with contemporary techniques such as colour filters and car paint. By leaving traces of craftsmanship, he fully embraces the manufacturing process of his creations.
The tension between people and nature, and how malleable this is, is a recurring topic in his often monumental work. Exotic leaves cast in aluminium form a new variety of palm, whimsical rock formations, and bas-reliefs of imaginative plants are all examples of how Filip Vervaet bends nature to his will. The relationship between man, artificiality, and nature therefore plays an important role in all his drawings, sculptures, and installations.
He subscribes to an existing tradition of sculpture. At the same time, his paintings have a strong dynamic, which he emphasises by adjusting dimensions or including sound, water, or wind. Light often plays an important role in his work as well. The play of light and reflections, as well as their dynamic nature, challenge the viewer’s perspective and welcome (physically) alternative points of view. As a result, his work is always shifting in relation to the position of the audience. References to art history and to civilisations that may or may not exist, as well as allusions to science fiction, contribute to an alienating viewing experience. Filip Vervaet’s work shows us a dream world that is as fascinating as it is enigmatic, situated in the liminal space between past and future, between untouched and cultivated nature.
From behind the appearance of things, a hidden reality emerges in the oeuvre of Lucie Lanzini (b. 1986, Belfort, France – lives and works in Brussels, Belgium). The artist transfers architectural references, daily objects, and decorative embellishments such as ropes into moulds and casts before assembling them into a three-dimensional collage. Birds, paws or claws, beams, columns or pieces of furniture are also present in her visual language, which feels opposing at times and compatible at others.
She transfers objects or fragments from one material to another, such as resin, polyurethane, mirror, glass, or metal. By using jesmonite, a composite material in different colours, she gives her work the look of contemporary bas-reliefs. Her sculptures capture light and reflections, and almost turn into “archaeological” remnants of a contemporary conceptual practice. Her creation process also preserves original elements, such as traces and imprints.
Lucie Lanzini pays particular attention to everyday forms due to their ability to evoke memories. In a sense, she cultivates a sensitivity to how memory works in a minimalist whole that, at the same time, evokes remnants of unexpected architecture. She moves between going back and forth, appearing and disappearing, and through concepts such as distance and connection, presence and absence, emptiness and fullness. Through the use of both familiar and recognisable elements, her works reveal an alienating reality.
Jorge Macchi (b. 1963, Buenos Aires – lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina) creates drawings, paintings, collages, videos, sculptures, and installations, and is always looking to evoke a maximum of emotions through a minimum of form. His work ranges from a simple visual language to an enigmatic world where fiction and reality are closely connected. By using everyday materials and a dash of humour, he intuitively unveils atmospheres that typically stay hidden when observing our daily environment.
The artist’s rule: the simpler the object, the more references it can include, the more personal the interaction with the observer will be. He draws inspiration from newspapers, maps, and archives. His works are often based on anecdotes, experiences, and coincidences of everyday life. At the same time, with a sense of tragedy and nostalgia, they are intertwined with references to literature, film, music, and art history. Puzzle pieces, bricks, hourglasses, matches, a piano keyboard, a computer keyboard, a sparkling disco ball, or a clock from a train station; all items remain as they are and yet receive an enchanting glow.
Jorge Macchi approaches his collected objects in an almost surreal manner, and his presentations appear to reveal hidden relationships. By showing a facet or fragment of an object, the artist simultaneously reveals other metaphors, dreams, or dramas. His work is therefore neither an illusion, fantasy, or magic trick, but rather demonstrates how we see things, how our eyes think and fill in possible meanings or invent different viewpoints. With his straightforward and tangible images, he wants to show that, through our emotional memory, we make more of certain objects than what they seem at first glance.
Maëlle Dufour (b. 1994, Mons – lives and works in Brussels, Belgium) creates spatial art that questions progress at the heart of past, known, and future eras. She examines traces of the belief in progress, and thinks about layers of meaning in human evolution. Recurring themes are the archeology of waste that questions the legacy we leave for future generations, the living memory of a society in decline, and the resilience of people.
Using clay, mud, blue stone, ceramics, dust, waste, lead sheets, rectangular mirrors, and bright red blown glass throughout her oeuvre, an explosion of materials appears. Sometimes her works present as monumental ruins, moon-like volcanic landscapes, or narrow watchtowers. The physical confrontation between her work and the viewer is therefore often disruptive, with the size and weight of the pieces transcending or diminishing our human scale, reminding us of the fragility of our own existence.
Via her sculptural installations, the artist explores the valuable resources of past societies – material legacies left for future generations. She purposely questions origin, memory, and history. Between appearing and disappearing, her works resonate lived experiences that are inevitably erased by time. Across borders, histories, and cultures, her varied body of work anticipates a possible hopeful future, while humanity’s survival seems to lean on the rhythm of transient civilizations.
To build her sculptures, installations, photos, and videos, Sara Bjarland (b. 1981 Helsinki, Finland – lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands) collects discarded objects or trash from rubbish heaps. She scavenges the streets, garbage containers, and recycling centres for broken, faded, and soiled items to take to her studio. Used mops, old ventilation pipes, and textiles from worn-out furniture are exposed, turned inside out, or take on new forms.
Her creative process is intuitive, and takes sculptural and aesthetic qualities of various objects into account. She investigates how materials that are considered worthless can serve as carriers of meaning, and live a new life as a work of art. Sometimes, she appropriates the found objects, and changes them in such a way that a parasol, sponge, or awning evoke new associations. Sometimes she casts weathered chairs, abandoned cacti, or outworn car tires in traditional materials such as ceramics or bronze. By incorporating a large number of objects in her work, she puts the magnitude of an ecological problem on display, while also raising questions about the many things we think we need so badly one day but pile up on the ever-growing waste mountain the next.
Sara Bjarland creates a contemporary landscape with blurred boundaries where an in-between territory forms, and every lifeless object is transformed into a mobile organism. She pays subtle attention to inanimate and living things, and lends a new appreciation to what is thrown away, broken, and banished. Her work challenges the dichotomy of life and death, the natural and the artificial, beauty and tragedy.
Selva Aparicio (b. 1987, Barcelona – lives and works in Barcelona, Spain, and Chicago, US) is an interdisciplinary artist who creates work at the intersection of installations and sculptures revolving around memory, intimacy, and mourning. She was born and raised in the woods of the Serra de Collserola Natural Park, where she was inspired by her childhood’s natural environment, cycle of life, and changing seasons. She frequently uses organic materials such as cricket wings, oyster shells, human cadavers, and dandelion fluffballs. Her art is reminiscent of a drawn-out ritual in which shifting emotions are reflected in the materials she chooses.
In the midst of a fairly tumultuous childhood, Selva Aparicio (by the way: “Selva” is the Spanish word for “jungle, forest”) absorbed the deep sense of tranquility from her natural environment. She lost her best friend who drowned in the Ebro river at the age of fifteen. From that moment on, she recognised grief as a critical component of her work, as an immediate requirement for understanding the complexities of death. As a result, her art revolves around very personal subjects such as grief and intimacy through channels that are not only beautiful and poetic, but also powerful and transformative on both an individual and collective level.
In addition to her great sense of memorial places that pay attention to grief, her ingenuity and technical precision are fundamental components of her work. In doing so, she pays close attention to a socially and ecologically sustainable approach, as well as the setting in which each work may end up. Her artworks evoke a sense of familiarity, like a sofa or a paravang (a windscreen with benches), while still conveying an alienated mood. It is as if you can touch past and future across generations.
Johan Creten (b. 1963, Sint-Truiden, Belgium – lives and works in Paris, France) is regarded as a pioneer in the 1980s revival of autonomous clay art. His ceramic and bronze sculptures range from impressive birds and fear-inducing squids to monumental bats. Their rich, symbolic charge is never unequivocal, and oscillates between temptation and fear, strength and fragility, the sacred and the demonic. But it’s not just his animal kingdom that seems to ooze an unsetteling strangeness; his human figures also exude a world of poetry, lyricism, and grandeur.
He deliberately uses a narrative structure and a more classical visual language, balancing between the grotesque and the baroque. His seemingly innocent figurative images emphasise the importance of beauty, while affirming the artist’s humanistic awareness and social resonance: the need for an exploration of the world with all of its individual and social tribulations. His magical creatures are complex metaphors for the ambiguity of human sexuality and the unpredictable power of nature.
Although his sculptures appear innocent, politics is never far away: his imaginary universe is filled with themes, motifs, and objects that take on symbolic meanings. For example, beehives represent community, acorns refer to power, and sea creatures symbolise the elusive. The mussel refers to the vulva, but also to a mold (“moule” in French means both “mussel” and “mold”), and therefore also to sculpture in general. Due to the often monumental proportions, his sculptures have an exploratory and challenging interaction with their surroundings. The importance of Creten’s visual language therefore lies not only in his technique, but also in what it says about us, about sculpture, about our culture, the world.
(Excerpt of the translations from Dutch to English for Beaufort 2024.)