Michiel Ceulers’ overstuffed exhibition, Belgo-Swiss Sensibilities (für ALP), at Galerie Barbara Seiler demonstrates frenetic activity coupled with the work’s material excesses in cardboard structures, combined found canvases and makeshift assemblages of panels, all marked by smudges of paint. They have rough edges at times, as with the star-shaped canvas Dreilandspunkt, 2022. Careful: you could scratch yourself and shed a tear of blood. As Ad Rheinardt famously said, sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting; the joke here is similar, only more unstable, and what you bump into is another painting.
The overarching sense of injury – or collision – is the exhibition’s principle of dissemination. As the title suggests, the artist’s practice is highly inter-referential. It summons common sensibilities, here shared by Belgian and Swiss territories, departing – as the exhibition text by Swiss and Brussels-based artist Annaïk Lou Pitteloud (or ALP) indicates – from works by painters Walter Swennen and Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, who share an interest for a subtly performed dilettante style of painting. Beyond Ceulers’ personal (anti-?)heroes, Martin Kippenberger, whose name also features in the text, seems the most potent reference for several obvious reasons. Take his use of semiotic language suggesting painterly inside jokes and the sociability that occurs (as with Ceulers, where we somehow always seem in on the joke but at the same time slightly left out), repeated identifications with animals (the frog for Kippenberger, the canary for Ceulers), or even an association in spirit between Cologne and Brussels.
Michiel Ceulers, Peanut grinder / Post Card (Köln am Rhein), 2024
Like Kippenberger, Ceulers uses artistic references to unveil rather than to create a stable lineage. Indeed, as suggested by their heavy yet wobbly materiality, the works map their terrain to further untether their coordinates, undoing fixity. Their vulnerability points, like with Kippenberger, to the collective self and the commonality of its experience.
Consider for example the smaller sculptures like Zwischen zwei Sofas: Bananen, Äpfel und Swennens Witz, 2024, a direct reference to Walter Swennen’s MMX (apple & banana), 2010. An image of the latter is placed in the exhibition text, next to another miniature sofa sculpture, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder’s Geschenk, 2013, turned into a tissue dispenser in a room recovered with mirrors. If both of those quoted works can be situated in a generational interest by painters to visualise their social networks – the banana and the apple talking as friends, the mirrors and the tissue of the painters’ concern that they make it –, the seemingly individualistic turn of Ceulers, in whose work only one sofa is occupied, could at first seem bitter.
But far from being commentaries on an impasse, Ceulers’ works manifest a sense of dirtiness, a danger of injury and an entropic quality that give them a living agency, away from a stance that would locate painting inside the pressures of historicisation or the anxiety of influence. In Ceulers’ sculpture, if only one sofa is occupied compared to Swennen’s, this time three bananas take their places on it, an act of irreverent multiplication?
Consider the paintings’ mock-heroism in the splashes, the misshapen frames stretching the canvases (they are often made from waste found in the street), recurring motifs from flowers to canaries to dots to apples and the general playfulness of the exhibition, with paintings presented almost shoulder to shoulder. All those effects free the works from the vortex of painterly games and create instead a meeting ground. This kind of paintings-as-junk à la Bruce Conner allows the works to deal with the neurotic in the patched-up, suggesting human affect in the open space of interrelation; here is heroism as vulnerability and sharing, countering a masculine prerogative of dominance and power. That’s where the painted motifs can be situated, when the crocodile pushes at the edge of the canvas in La pharmacie du crocodile : fabrique-t-elle ses propres antibiotiques ? / Un promenade avec Monsieur Delmotte dans la neige (under a kaleidoscope of mirror disco reflections), 2023-24, for instance; when the painting hosts an affectionate dedication ‘Für alp’ in Delivery note lumberjack shirt / Pappkamerad, 2024; or when another artist, this time Frank Stella, opens up Ceulers’ psychogeography manifested by the title, in Wenn man die unterirdische Passage des Kunsthauses in Zürich betritt, kommt man dann im Kunstmuseum Basel wieder heraus? (Irgendwie erinnert mich das an Kippys imaginäres U-Bahn-System, aber dieses Mal mit einer Stella als U-Bahn-Haltestelle), 2024. This carnivalesque playfulness allows the references to move further from the constancy of lineage. Add to this the dense activity of the works, all that happens in the processes of painterly production from finding strange shapes in the streets of Brussels that may well be used as canvases to hanging them on the walls of a gallery in Zürich. Not being stable references on a fixed timeline, the works operate more as open wounds, always ready to incorporate new affections, testimonies of having loved, or at least for having tried, of having been out there.
Michiel Ceulers, Belgo-Swiss Sensibilities (für ALP), Galerie Barbara Seiler, Rämistr. 18, 8001 Zürich, 28 September–27 October 2024.