The exhibition brings forth the work of three artists — Enrico Bach, Cosimo Casoni and Max Kesteloot. Together, these artists engage with painting, redefining its possibilities.

Enrico Bach (b. 1980, DE) employs line, form, and color to create trompe l'oeil effects that suggest depth, yet he disrupts the precision of his geometric abstractions with spontaneous gestures, introducing an element of randomness that challenges the viewer's perception.
Cosimo Casoni (b. 1990, IT) focuses on the possibilities of painting within the context of a continuous art-life relationship. He merges classical themes such as landscape and still life with elements of post-graffiti styles, notably "skate painting" and "fingertricks," reflecting a vibrant and dynamic interaction between traditional and modern influences.
Max Kesteloot (b. 1990, BE) – delves up images from an extensive and chaotic archive of short films, looking for what he calls “things he could have painted”. Following the classical idea of what a painting is, he works with acrylic and ink pigment on Belgian linen.

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ENRICO BACH
*1980, DE

Born 1980 in Leipzig, Germany.
Lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Enrico Bach’s compositions are characterized by the division of the pictorial space into two halves. A picture-within-a-picture principle in which each side stands on its own and yet corresponds with the other half. The layered areas of color and pattern thus create the illusion of a more or less deep space. At the same time, Bach leaves behind the conventional compositional pattern of a centered motif: the picture's edge, ground and interfaces become depth-giving design levels. The abstract lines in interaction with diffuse figures and blurred elements in the background represent a novelty. While the precise and opaque lines are in the process of approaching a form or dissolving it, Bach blurs art historical quotations on the background behind them. The pictorial motifs are no longer completely detached from any reference to concrete figuration, but questionand revolve around it. The line always moves between figuration and abstraction and is in the process of defining surface and space more precisely.

Enrico Bach (*1980, Leipzig) completed his master's degree in 2011 at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe under Prof. Gustav Kluge. His works have been shown at the Guangdong Museum of Arts, Guangzhou, Start Museum Shanghai, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, the Würth Collection, Schwäbisch Hall, Sammlung Ritter, Waldenbuch, KUNSTWERK Klein Collection, Eberdingen-Nussdorf and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

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COSIMO CASONI
*1990, IT

Cosimo Casoni (1990) was born in Florence.
He lives and works between Grosseto and Milan.

Casoni’s work mainly focuses on painting and its possibilities, in a view of a constant art-life relationship. The artist combines the traditional themes of landscape and still life with various post-graf ti styles: in particular “skate painting” and “ ngertricks”. In recent years, these two approaches have characterized his research, which has mainly focused on the study of the “sign” as a vehicle of evocative, aesthetic and compositional aspects.

Actions such as using the skateboard deck as a large brush, or marking the pictorial material with ngers, are used both individually and as part and parcel of more complex works, through a pictorial process struc- tured in layers, made of overlaps and cancellations.
The artist’s restless nature is combined with an opposing desire for order: geometry becomes the enclosure in which to dare and experiment; his creative process consists in a continuous exercise based on the alterna- tion of planning and improvising, moments of action and of thought.

Casoni’s paintings look like rebuses with no single solution, in which the collective imagination meets the artist’s personal experience. His pictures represent a mental space in which the artist can organize the elements, the actions and the techniques as instruments on a score. By looking for possible meanings and new visual geographies, Casoni creates images that live in balance between stillness and movement, reality and illusion.

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MAX KESTELOOT
*1990, BE

Born 1990 in Gent.
Lives and works in Ostende, Belgium.

Max Kesteloot delves up images from an extensive and chaotic archive of photographs and short films, looking for what he calls “things he could have painted”. Following the classical idea of what a painting is, he works with acrylic and ink pigment on Belgian linen. The works of Kesteloot seem to frame the almost unnoticed background, the square centimeters next to a movie star’s head, or a vague memory, halted. (…)

Having “a five finger discount on everything he sees”, Max Kesteloot pickpockets images. A twig put on a windshield or a streetcorner view, they are stills from short films, often frozen mid-zoom. Working on canvas now with digital images rather than on wood with analogue print as he used to, allows him agility in size while letting him reframe the painting until the last minute, playing with its negative space. (…) His choice of scenes suggest a presence of a “before” and an “after”, as the grain of the filmic early digital camera grants movement to his still lives.

A life between stillness and motion, he either spends stretches of time on each one of these paintings hibernating in the Ostend studio, or driving around the South with a mattress in the trunk, snapping images in a trail of continuity, like bugs on the rear window. Kesteloot, moved by a will to paint, looks for “good lost corners, places that appeal to him”. (…) Max Kesteloot’s aesthetics have a strong air of that, and a salty sunny gush of America. A single yellow rose, a blurry palmtree outline, it’s the type of images you could imagine living in the corner of Lana del Rey’s batting lashes.

(excerpts from a text by Céline Mathieu, April 2023)



 

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