Laurent Reypens: The beauty of an object

“The beauty of an object” is a selection of the Belgian artist’s works (large paintings alongside small compositions) will accompany the presentation of glass sculptures made at the Murano furnace of Berengo Studio 1989.

In all the works, only one subject has been of long-standing interest
to Reypens in his art. It is the simple contemplation of common things,
of an everyday object that has driven the artist to an obsessive fascination with both its shape and the realistically rendered smoothness of its surface. “The secret of my painting is contained in that bowl although no one ever will see or discover what it is. The bowl is turned towards the interior of the painting, leaving its contents to our imagination.”

In his paintings, the subject is always a classic Royal Boch bowl, turning this concave hemisphere with a thin circular base from a detail in some sort of still life, or other more complex composition, into a distinctive subject, an absolute protagonist. Reypens’s technique of putting acrylic on panel – the same one used by the old masters – subverts the conventions of Renaissance and even International Gothic painting in which household objects were often symbolic or allusive clues for understanding the pictorial composition’s overall story.

Here, in Reypens’s paintings, nothing happens and time seems to have stopped, awaiting someone to come and have a look. In the painting is everything that is needed to understand his work; no critical documents
or interviews are necessary. The work contains the habitual subject that, depending on the artist’s mood, is depicted with somber or bright colors, though always in shades of white, black, and gold, using a sfumato technique that approaches a perfection found only in the classical renderings of human skin. The bowls, in the same way they hold liquids, likewise contain their meaning.
This impossibility of discerning the contents of the bowls has also been transferred to the glass sculptures and small totems in which the compositions of individual bowls turned upside down make it impossible to see what is inside.

The Laurent Reypens exhibition is the second to be held at Berengo Studio 1989’s new Venice Projects Fenice Gallery, a newly designed space created in association with the Fondazione Berengo, again this year at the forefront of the Art Biennale with Glasstress. Curated by Chiara Casarin, the schedule of exhibitions will alternate national and international artists and designers in innovative personal exhibitions. The glass sculptures created for the occasion by Laurent Reypens at Berengo Studio’s glass furnace on Murano will be on display at the exhibition preview for “The Beauty of an Object”.