L’Atlas is pleased to announce its new collaboration with Belgian gallery Meessen. The exhibition Absences, mues et macules will gather twenty one artists from multiple backgrounds : Ignasi Aballí, Léa Belooussovitch, Marc Buchy, Lieven De Boeck, Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Ellen Harvey, Rinko Kawauchi, Nicolás Lamas, Benoît Maire, mountaincutters, Cornelia Parker, Benoît Platéus, Claudio Parmiggiani, Jorge Méndez Blake, Evariste Richer, Solène Rigou, Namsal Siedlecki, José María Sicilia, Thu Van Tran, Chaim van Luit and Xie Lei.

As its title suggests, Absences, mues et macules is an open exhibition. Under a title allowing us to understand the work of contemporary artists defended by Meessen, a contemporary art gallery established in Brussels since 2008, the exhibition aims to open lines of flight while offering relevant parallelisms on the notions of absence, loss and erasure. The practice of the artists gathered is based on conceptual rigor while not shying away from a certain visual seduction.
Whether via erasure (Aballi, Lamas, Sicilia), erosion (Fridfinnsson, Kawauchi, Lamas), framing (Platéus, Rigou, Xie), blurring (Belooussovitch), recovery (mountaincutters, Richer, van Luit), lacuna (Maire), chemical transformation Siedlecki, van Luit), combustion (Parmiggiani), the works collected here call upon gestures which may seem a priori iconoclastic but which turn out, in a constant paradox, reveal the density of each work.
Going against the tide of gigantism and immediacy, Absences, mues et macules brings together artists who could be described as conceptual romantics developing common preoccupations with emptiness, disappearance and silence. They take the opposite view of the need to show everything immediately and question us about the inextricable links that exist between all presence and all absence.

About Meessen
Meessen is a contemporary art gallery that brings a group of strong, international artists. The gallery occupies three floors in a house built in 1911, including a «Wunderkammer», offering a particular look on the theatre of the world. The gallery also publishes catalogues and editions in close collaboration with the represented artists, in order to promote and distribute their work.