Summary
- French artist Marguerite Piard is set to open Les Veilleuses at Stems Gallery in Brussels on August 14
- Through her work, Piard urges audiences to challenge perceptions of female nudity
Stems Gallery is set to open a new solo exhibition by Marguerite Piard at its Brussels flagship. In Les Veilleuses, which translates to The Night Lights, paintings of friends, family and lovers staged in intimate settings burst with with warm, humane hues “Les Veilleuses is about our loved ones,” as the gallery described.
Piard’s tender, often tightly framed, captures transport us to an emotional limbo akin to the silence shared between two friends. Echoing this sentiment is her unique choice of canvas, looking to sculpted wooden panels or smooth slabs of stone as canvases. Here, the artist presents bodies in an ethereal, introspective light where her subjects, still grounded in unique characters, can let themselves go.
Through these autofictional encounters, Piard challenges common notions of female nudity and desirability with an empathetic hand: “Addressing desire without sexualization. Glorifying without pomp and circumstance through the prism of tenderness,” Eloïse Duguay wrote in a press statement. Unapologetic and raw, the artist aims to “liberate” her subjects through the act of art making, rather than merely depict them. “From then on, her quest for comfort, for solitary and shared confrontations, became a mutual emancipation.”
“For Marguerite Piard, painting and the body are one and the same. Both transform, tell, convey, experience, to such an extent that they merge,” Duguay contines. “They are bridges that we cross and on which our experiences are traced, which the artist encourages us not to conceal.”
For those who find themselves in the Belgian capital, Les Veilleuses opens on August 14 and will remain on view through September 14.
Stems Gallery Brussels
Rue du Prince Albert 4,
1050 Ixelles,
Belgium
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