On view until August 1st.
For his first solo exhibition at Hioco Delany, Alex Brassart starts from an image that is never his own. A film still, a newspaper photograph, a grainy fragment from a documentary or a Youtube video with almost no views; the source is always something already seen, already circulating. The title, THE SHAME OF SEEING, points to what happens in that act of looking: not the image itself, but the discomfort of being a viewer at all.
Brassart paints quickly, wet on wet, in soft, dissolving passages where colours are still allowed to collide. There is no underlying drawing, no careful build-up in layers. This sits at odds with a more romantic idea of painting, the slow, patient accumulation that results in something resolved and "beautiful". This speed is no coincidence: it mirrors the uncomfortable, voyeuristic character of the images themselves. It is an intuitive way of working: Brassart does not research or develop a series, but selects by what unsettles or moves him.
What interests him is not the image as such, but everything it carries with it: tension, ambiguity, the space that opens up when a fragment loses its original frame. There is something of the conspiracy theorist's logic in this: the way a cropped fragment, a freeze-frame, a grainy still can be made to mean almost anything, and the viewer is left to fill in what is missing. Three bodies stand close together in the dark, lit a venomous yellow-green, their faces barely legible, caught between a group portrait and something closer to surveillance footage. Elsewhere, a charred, ember-red landscape glows behind the black verticals of trees, as if a fire or a flare has just gone off-screen.
Nothing here is autobiographical in a literal sense, yet the paintings are not without him either: they suggest a position, a way of looking, without ever showing the thing itself. That position is precisely what THE SHAME OF SEEING asks the viewer to occupy, with everything that comes with it: the sense of trespassing, of having seen something you were not meant to see, or of taking pleasure in looking at something you probably shouldn't.
His own fascinations run from Walter Sickert, who painted from press photographs and newspaper cuttings, his rooms cropped and skewed as if glimpsed through a half-open door, to the dark, intimate scale of Caravaggio and the unease running through Francis Bacon's bodies. These are not quoted directly, but they form a vocabulary of darkness, proximity and discomfort that runs through the work. The colour itself carries that unease. Nothing here is naturalistic: the light is more reminiscent of a flickering screen than a room, a fire-orange glow or a cold, foreign blue that sits like a body of its own within a painting. The colour does not describe what is seen so much as how it feels to see it.
THE SHAME OF SEEING does not offer a single image to settle on. It is an exhibition about the sheer volume of images we are exposed to, the thousands we will see in a lifetime, where earlier generations saw only a handful, and about what it means to keep looking anyway. Rather than a stable portrait, Brassart proposes a viewing space in which meaning keeps shifting between subject, image and viewer.
Text by Isabel Van Bos
