Stephan Balleux + David Leleu @ Beat Galerie

Der Schlaf der Vernunft gebärt Träume / The Sleep of Reason
produces Dreams is an exhibition project that, for the very first time
in Berlin, proposes the meeting between Stephan Balleux (1974°,
Belgium) and David Leleu (1973°, France), two young painters
coming from the Brussels art scene. Borrowing its name from the
title of one of Francesco de Goya’s famous print, which it diverts,
the exhibition »Der Schlaf der Vernunft gebärt Träume« proceeds
into the visual/perceptible field, as well as into the intellectual one.
Through the strong and, at once dreamlike and ambiguous potential
of the presented images, this exhibition absorbs the viewers’ gazes
and minds into a visual experience taking them beyond the boundary
of irrationality, and therefore sinks the spectator into his own inner
mental universe. Very different in regard to the final appearance of
their artworks, Stephan Balleux and David Leleu however share
the same interest for the notion of image, notion that both of them are
exploring through the contemporary modes of its visuality. If painting
constitutes at once for both artists, the starting and the finishing point
of their artistic researches, nevertheless those one find an extension
to drawing, as well as to video.
On the one hand, the Stephan Balleux’s artworks testify of a perfectly
mastered pictorial technique, which makes us plunge us into the
very baroque environment of a mazing visuality, deploying itself until
hyperrealism borders. His work thus makes light of the uninterrupted
presence of the virtual and digital pictures that are so typical from
our contemporary visual culture. Resulting from a traditional process,
the genesis of his pictures is elaborated through successive stages,
leading reciprocally from object to photography, then from photography
to drawing, painting or even to three dimensions video. Hostile to any
set points, Stephan Balleux’s pictures represent many crossing paths
and meeting points between all of those techniques. Showing a great
amount of naïve and Pop sensitivity, David Leleu’s pictures draw
their primary material from every registers of pictures, as for example
mass medias, advertisement or the Internet, and therefore recombine
and mix them with the fields of playful and privacy. His work therefore
gives to these impersonal and »cold« pictures a human sensibility,
and provides them with authentic pictorial and poetic workmanship.
By having recourse, and on the contrary of Stephan Balleux, to very
small, or even tiny formats in the case of his drawings, David Leleu’s
paintings are as many pieces of jewellery, set with thousands details
that invite the viewer’s eye to lose itself into the depth of the tangled
visual levels that constitute these recomposed pictures.