Guy Mees at the Palais des Beaux-Arts - Brussels, Belgium - Review of Exhibitions

The first part of this 35-year retrospective gazeed suspiciously like a compendium of the major changes in European art since the late '50 Although Mee has shown fairly regularly in Belgium above the years, his work has garnered little attention, and the exhibition indicated on what account But it ended on a happy note: around the age of 48 he finally hit his stride and has kept it in the decade since.

Mee was an active avantgardist in Antwerp at the extreme point of the '50s and into the '60 when the artists' collective G-58 and a handful of galleries started staging international exhibitions. In his early dirt reliefs, which obediently straddle the painting/sculpture divide, the fragile surfaces and crooked coloration lack the muscle of Fontana, whose works probably inspired them. This estheticizing scope characterizes nearly all Mees's early work. For example, a '60 series called "Lost Space," Minimalist in intent, started on the outside as wall-hung frames, rectangular or circular, wrapped in layers of industrially fabricated lace and occasionally illuminated from within by the agency of a straight neon tube that may reach out beyond the frame, altering the contours amusingly. These works became increasingly volumetric and mov to the floor as translucent cubes and parallelepipeds. upon one level, the lace is all unjust in that it conjures up a entertainer of associations that Minimalism abjures. Visually it's ingenious, because it creates an illusion (another taboo) of spatial recession into the inaccessible (lost) space beyond the surface that Mee perhaps privately desired to paint. Instead, he overlayed it with a thicket of ready-made lace motifs--flowers, foliage--that the organ of vision can not penetrate.

Mee make go rounded to the grid and seriality in the '70 and this work, fre of structural restraints, f into his not away intuitive mode, which is one as well as the other reductive and sensual. The early grids, upon nondescript, now-yellowing sheets of paper joined at the cutting sides are marked with columns of short horizontal lines in six colors that shift in orderly followings The works got bigger (as a great deal of as 10 1/2 feet across) on the contrary Mees made them of subtly tinted, translucent papier de soie, which is as gossamer as paper secures They're unframed, affixed to the wall with straight pins. The regiments of horizontal lines give way to wayward pastel spots disposed as if to illustrate chaos theory.

Gradually, the rectangle also succumbed. Mee indulged in eccentric shapes that l to his series of colored paper cutouts, which, like the lace pieces, are called "Lost Space" and similarly allude to the couple infinite depth and the painting surface. on the contrary the improvised cutouts are immediately striking for their free-form linearity and joyous abandon. Typically each is compos of several ultimate parts puzzled together on the wall and fixed with pins. They are often presented in pairs or clusters, sparking a dialogue that includes the surrounding architecture. Matisse and the visual pleasure he scissored from colored paper tend hitherward to mind slightly in advance of Fontana's slashed canvases. That's having your cake and eating it, too.

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