What could a large format canvas by Françoise Pétrovitch, an incongruous assembly by Présence Panchounette, a ?blurred? painting by Julien Tiberi and a polyurethane foam sculpture by Piero Gilardi possibly have in common?  Their simple presence within the same space, brought together by Semiose Gallery.  

Like the walls and showcases of a collector?s den, eclecticism is the name of the game in the proposal the gallery has formulated for the 2017 ArtBrussels fair. Or rather that Semiose has woven together, like a tale featuring multiple characters. ?To come up with a good story, you need to choose your characters for their strong personalities, place them in an appropriate décor and then just let things happen.? might more accurately describe the stand?s modus operandi.

Of our quartet, Présence Panchounette would be the first actor to take the stage. Having garnered much applause for their solo show at ArtBrussels 2015, the collective returns with a number of historic oeuvres ? inevitably historic as the group disbanded in 1990 ? emblematic of their taste for the collusion of genres and symbolic registers (Guerre et Paix consisting of a plastic garden gnome and the memoires of General de Gaulle), their fondness for puns (a bean shaped, Formica table combined with a chainsaw of the Stil brand, becomes a Meuble de style) and their ferocious social critique (The trashy Africa of their Disco Boy installation boomerangs back, straight for the head of the colonialist).  

The second actor to make an appearance is Piero Gilardi, an eminent member of the Arte Povera movement and brilliant inventor of Tapis Nature, a vision of landscape in polyurethane foam. Piero Gilardi has endeavored to theorize and orient his work around ?livable? and ?micro-emotional? art. His large carpet, Spiaggia di Igueste (2011), is 1.50 m long and brings a slice of nature to the fair, inviting the spectator to stretch out on a beach reduced to a single portion and ultimately giving a joyful demonstration of the reconciliation between art and life.   

The last to take the stage are the couple of painters brought together for the occasion: Françoise Pétrovitch and Julien Tiberi.  She, as a maestria, who was recently idolized at her Paca FRAC exhibition in Marseille, also featured on the front page of the newspaper Libération in December 2015 and is collected by some of the most important museums, while he as a young debutant inaugurates his first paintings in color after an early career mainly dedicated to drawing. Françoise Pétrovitch?s exhibit consists of a series of large format paintings with green as the dominant tone, where adolescents strike poses typical of their age. Julien Tiberi presents a number of abstract paintings, in which the spectator can glimpse aspects of blurred landscapes.

Our four disparate characters are allowed complete freedom to interact on the stand, whose design constitutes the décor of the intrigue. The reasoning behind this vaudeville plays on the attraction of opposites, a coming together through difference or the association of ideas based on opposition. This state of antagonism continuously kick-starts the action: The clarity of Présence Panchounette?s ready-mades contrasts with the blurred nature of Julien Tiberi?s painting; the hard surfaces of the paintings repudiate the soft texture of Piero Gilardi?s Tapis nature; the gravity of Françoise Pétrovitch?s drawings of adolescents subverts the joyful grotesqueness of Présence Panchounette?s installations.
Clearly, this dialectic of opposition is fertile ground for thought. Or to put it another way: how wonderful it is, that a stand for an art fair can be the stage for the fortuitous coming together of an oil painting, a garden gnome, a stretch of beach and a chainsaw.

Solo Show: Steve Gianakos

?Picasso-esque or Gruyere cheese-like faces, heads like hams or Greek urns: Gianakos?s girls don?t have an easy life or profile. They also find themselves steeped in a murky and complicated environment. All of this stems from a variety of different things: first of all, their silhouettes seem to have some difficulty in holding together and are certainly far from flawless. Then there are the sheets of paper on which the girls are laid out and that are slightly warped or deformed. This is undoubtedly due to their being splashed with brownish or yellowish gouache as well as considerable handling and the layering of quite a few photocopies.?  Judicaël Lavrador on the subject of the New York artist Steve Gianakos? creatures.

Since the end of the 60s, Gianakos? drawings, collages and acrylic paintings have brought together innocence and lechery, vulgarity and sophistication in order to reveal the absurd concoction of sexuality and anxiety at the heart of the human condition. His oeuvres bring to mind vintage cartoons that have gotten out of control: Pin-up girls tormented by slithering snails or snakes with their inquisitive tongues, knock-kneed little girls lifting their skirts, animals and humans brought together in lascivious or menacing scenarios, ? Through his use of humor Gianakos manages to disarm the spectator into submitting to his deliciously dark and subversive vision of the human psyche. His works are replete with burlesque humor and ribaldry and strike a lightweight note, exempt from cynicism and cruelty. Gianakos? imagery is deceptively simple, composed of outlines and blocks of color. Throughout his oeuvre, we find witty references to Pop Art, Surrealism and abstraction, refined into visions of a culture and society fueled by our own desires and weaknesses.  

Gianakos is a major figure of American Art and his work is included in the collections of the MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum in New York.