Jaime Angelopoulos

January 12 – March 4, 2018

Curator Eve De Garie-Lamanque

Jaime Angelopoulos' practice originates from an autobiographical impulse before taking on a collective dimension. She feeds on personal experiences which first take form on paper (by means of drawing and creative writing), to then unfold in physical space. The making of miniatures is a way for the artist to conduct colour tests and to evaluate the stature of future large-format works.

To insinuate oneself into the graphic universe of Jaime Angelopoulos is to accept to surrender to one's sensuality and to embrace one's vulnerability. Admittedly, as they offer themselves as autonomous while linked to one another as in a rhizome, the five drawings and ten sculptures exhibited may seem to adhere to exclusively formal concerns. However, behind their minimalist and abstract exterior, shines a powerful humanism. Sometimes dynamic and extroverted, at other times apathetic and introverted, the works invoke in succession hope and despair, movement and immobility, claiming, by their scale and verticality, an intimate relation to the body.

The artist's fundamental preoccupation with the body, and above all for what agitates it, refers to the notion of the "expressive body," as it is encountered in the performing arts. Such aims converge with those of the pioneers of modern dance (Françoise Sullivan, Franziska Boas), notably in the quest for a full consciousness of the body achievable through an intentional exteriorization of the emotive charge that inhabits it.

Jaime Angelopoulos is able to codify that which is immaterial, which she then appropriates into her own visual language. Although her works originate in an autobiographical quest before taking on a collective dimension, the dreams, the concerns that they express are those of an entire generation. Her practice, profoundly anchored in the human experience, constitutes in itself, and by that fact alone, an act of resistance.

Ève De Garie-Lamanque