< mountaincutters
Les indices de la respiration primitive
mountaincutters
Jun 19, 2021 - Sep 11, 2021
La Verrière - Fondation d'Entreprise Hermès, Brussels (Belgium)
Opening in 2019, “Matters of Concern | Matières à panser” is the third series of exhibitions curated by Guillaume Désanges for La Verrière. Following on from “Des gestes de la pensée” (“Gestures, and thought”) and “Poésie balisitique” (“Ballistic poetry”), this series coheres around a particular attention to materials. With a title borrowed from philosopher Bruno Latour, it features a wide range of different approaches that variously foreground the spiritual, social, symbolic, therapeutic and magical properties attributed to materials. Across the exhibitions that make up the series, new relations between art and the living world, objects and material elements emerge. Désanges offers an open exploration that sets out to pay close attention to, and even to “care” for, materials, as well as to grasp their transformational power.

For the seventh exhibition in the series “Matters of Concern | Matières à panser”, La Verrière welcomes French artist duo mountaincutters, who have lived and worked in Brussels since 2015. For their first exhibition in the Belgian capital, the artists present a new body of work based on a site-specific scenography that takes into account the dimensions and the qualities – the height, the form, the lighting – of the exhibition space. Their works, whose hybrid nature lends itself to a certain destabilisation of the viewer, use transitory situations and incomplete forms to shape strange compositions endowed with a savage beauty. Amongst the modified materials and organic fragments that make up their work, carefully handcrafted elements create a subtle tension, to which drawings, films and texts arranged throughout the space also contribute. Through this exhibition and its poetic title, Les Indices de la respiration primitive (“Signs of primal breath”), mountaincutters offer an original perspective on the place of humans within the world and its elements, both living and inert.