Juxtapoz Magazine – Pieter Jennes’s Rabelaisian Romp Through a Densely Populated Forest

Belgian artist Pieter Jennes‘ new exhibition When Weeds Bloom at Nino Mier Gallery is a Rabelaisian romp by means of a densely populated forest that includes 20-five new paintings, furniture, and a floor set up.

Final calendar year in Antwerp, wherever Jennes presently lives and is effective, a social scene burgeoned outdoors the city center. Mainly because the pandemic pressured the closure of many public gathering spots, men and women began congregating in the woods, exactly where land was nonetheless public. Jennes describes an invigorating combine of desperation and glee, as people today would obtain in freezing temperatures to drink, chat, and dance in just an practically laughably severe landscape. In When Weeds Bloom, Jennes signifies some of the spirit of these gatherings, harnessing the shock, humor, and antiauthoritarianism that characterizes the carnivalesque.

Several of Jennes’ slapstick compositions are divided in two, albeit unequal sections: one particular aspect consists of a determine (or two) slipping, although the other depicts a little huddle of figures with mask or doll-like faces staring at the screen of gracelessness in advance of them. Crowds of clustered people have been, for the improved aspect of the earlier two years, a taboo. But in Jennes’ paintings, what is unsafe is also what is lifetime-affirming. His males and beasts issue to the self-deprecating comedy that is so frequently a reprieve from the depths of despair, loneliness, and worry. In why and How? … no person will know, a cow inexplicably falls back again-very first onto an unsuspecting sufferer smoking cigarettes a cigarette. In fact: why, and how? We look to Jennes’ other paintings for solutions, but they reply only with beguiling, clownish revelry.

The exhibition captures its cast of human and animal figures mid-gesture inside theatrically flat out of doors settings. Jennes foregoes crystal clear delineations between foreground and history, positioning horizon traces close to the canvases’ decreased edge, and eschewing naturalistic perspective. Depth as an alternative is articulated in Jennes’ surfaces, which are labored palimpsests of abundant oil paint. Considerably of the texture, sample, and even emotion (his trees are stuffed with lovers’ inscriptions) exhibited in the will work is realized by means of his painstaking manipulation of matter and type.

The flattened compositions in When weeds bloom resemble stages, revealing Jennes’ fascination in the dynamics between functionality and observation. In I like everyday living a large amount, a determine topples headfirst into the grass whilst his dancing compatriots notice with warm smiles. In I’m scared my toes are blue, a gentleman on an overturned bicycle pushes a good friend to the ground. A dense mass of figures acquire at the painting’s margin, viewing the scene with intrigue. The strangeness of currently being perceived can take on an explicitly surreal tone in where by have you fallen, have you fallen? The painting depicts a man falling headfirst from a tree. He is inches away from the ground, but rather of grass we capture a glimpse of yet another face. Their gaze locks: the falling person has been caught. Regretably for him, his debauched tumble will not be damaged, only witnessed.

The connection among actor and observer plays out not just involving figures in just the paintings, but also in the variety and handle of the exhibition as a total. While the flattened space of each canvas could feel to push again on us, their installation reaches outward, inviting us into its sphere. Jennes’ forest surrounds us on all sides, and a suite of fifty metal frogs lies beneath our feet. The artist even features us a place to sit and continue to be a while: he hand-crafted a bench, a table, and a set of chairs for the exhibition. The galleries, then, turn into Jennes’ expanded canvas, and we develop into members of his enchanted earth.

The attitude and aesthetics of carnival are deeply entrenched inside Jennes’ operates, which uncover auspices in fellow-Belgian painter James Ensor’s kaleidoscopically grotesque compositions. Typically, Carnival serves as a suspension of social and political mores. At the time masks and costumes are donned, the procedures of well mannered modern society screech to a halt and citizens of any course are offered the probability to embody a much more libertine id with tiny consequence. While When Weeds Bloom—which functions vagrants who consume, ogle, dance, sing, jump, and tumble amid skinny-trunked trees—does not overtly reference the celebration, its spirit is obvious in the design and articles of the work. Furthermore, his paintings depict the dangers we are prepared to take in the identify of festivity.