On January 5, 2022, the Framing Gallery began hosting Belgian artist Didier Engels' first exhibition in New York: The Dock.
Didier Engels's creation has the standard of the "rightness" of contemporary art: that is, the connection between creation and individual experience. This connection is reflected both in life experiences and in creatively characteristic sources. The former, his life as a docker in his youth, explains his focus on dock subject matter, while the latter, with more than 30 years of experience in texture research (25 years as a textile designer and 5 years as an interior design architect), illustrates his approach to abstract forms and colours.
When people pass by galleries, I think many people are attracted by the eye-catching beauty in the large glass-through windows, but the power of that beauty may also make serious art appreciators critical: whether the work is suspected of commercialization. However, if you stop and listen carefully, you may feel that these works do have spiritual depth and transcendence. The bottomless black background resembles the legendary world of ideas, and the objects in the foreground are symbolized by the artist's clever hand to alienate the "idea" and "shape" (Plato's philosophical concept). These completely practical means of transport, which are not deliberately stacked and stacked, these dock containers, which are low-key and simple day after day to the point that they have been ignored by countless people and have nothing to do with art, highlight the metaphysical beauty beyond manpower in the artist's finished products, and the contrast between the reflection and the positive shadow in the strengthened water also seems to set off the dazzling of the conceptual world and the real world.
For a long time in the context of modern and contemporary art, rendering beauty was a cautionary thing for a proud and serious artist. But things have changed dramatically in recent years, and most galleries in New York are now inclined to showcase well-made, colorful art, led by the benchmarks of grand galleries. In the early years, criticism of the erosion and interference of capital on artistic creation was issued from time to time; now that the general trend is so, artists are not immune, so how to express it in the gap between the art market and the independence and stubbornness of the individual spirit is the considerable point of today's art.
Didier should be shrewd and sensitive, and he has adopted an eclectic approach, on the one hand, he uses late technology to promote visual aesthetics that is similar to "technical access", and at the same time, he seems to accept a widely accepted metaphor for the mottled history of life, trying to balance dazzling beauty with some kind of emotional connection, in order to obtain multiple dimensions of the work and construct richness. But he may not have imagined that the viewer would feel an emotional state that could not find a stable fulcrum in front of his well-planned work! If the "dappled years" in the lens is a nostalgic emotional cue, the beautiful and mesmerizing color form clearly makes this melancholy nowhere to stay. And when you try to enjoy visual pleasures freely, there is a frivolous mechanism that despises you, because the formal beauty of the work should be that it has gone beyond the worldly sensory world without being known, and entered the territory of the objective spirit pursued by early European abstract art, but this spiritual purity and freedom are always dragged back to the world by the implanted emotions.
My conjecture from watching Didier is that the artist seems to be more obsessed with the transcendental color of form than the "dirty and exaggerated" dock life of the past, perhaps the mottled mottled that is no longer mottled is just the foil of "the debauchery of this era", or perhaps the amplified narrative of that light life is the real market charm involuntary, but this is in line with the cruel truth of our time, and many grand tragic narratives are often the great flattery of the art market! Before Didier, I always think of Damehurst, who showed the beauty of the cruelty to life, and before his works, did humans really appreciate the pure visual beauty and shock, perhaps more to use the visual beauty and art name to secretly enjoy the original Nazi-like cruel nature that lurked in the heart. In short, I appreciate the more "simple beauty" of Didier's works.