Le ballet des Cellules
Le ballet des Cellules
Le ballet des Cellules
In her new series of paintings, under the collective title Le ballet des cellules, the work of Agnes Maes (Aarsele, 1942) has taken a significant turn, giving her a special position in an iconoclastic tradition. Before the Le ballet des cellules series came about, Agnes Maes worked in an abstract idiom with an architectural and erotic content. The eroticism has remained in her abstract range of colours, but the spaces, by looking beneath the skin of the human body, have turned inward.
The turning point came when the artist was faced with many cases of illness, old age and death in her immediate surroundings. This led to her a growing fascination for the revolution in the biomedical sciences and in several publications she encountered the marvellous paradox that the most terrible diseases yield the most beautiful medical images. A second paradox also arose, characterised by the tension between her source material (medical photos) and her abstract artistic idiom.
The abstract art of the 20th century tore itself away from the belief in the observing eye to which other areas of society fully profess. In its iconoclastic gesture, abstract art shook off the belief that everything can be made visible – which originated in the Enlightenment – and thereby took a fundamentally different direction. Unlike the sciences, abstract art does not believe that everything that exists can be made visible, but demands the right to proclaim that what is invisible also has the right to exist.
This makes it particularly remarkable that in Agnes Maes’ new series of works, Le ballet des cellules, these two fundamentally different directions seem to merge once again. Whereas they are normally at daggers drawn, in Agnes Maes’ work they are brought together again, though not without tension. Whereas in most abstract art the referential element is upset, in this case it is restored. The areas of colour, the spots and the lines once again refer to a visually observable reality. This reality cannot be observed with the naked eye, but can with the microscopic medical eye.
This naturally represents a difference between her and several of her artistic contemporaries. The origin of her 2000 work Untitled (brain structure) and Luc Tuymans’ work Lungs is the same. The source of Tuymans’ work is a colour photo of human lungs taken from a nineteen-fifties medical encyclopaedia. Maes takes her inspiration from a somewhat more recent medical photo of the structure of the human brain. Tuymans treats his subject in the most sceptical, cool and detached way imaginable, while Maes places a warm, human and sensitive glow over her image.
In fact the traditional scepticism of most abstract art is alien to Agnes Maes. Her belief in the notion of progress and her love of the intellect have made hers a lonely voice in artistic circles, but when it comes to art she defends her position with vigour. In her 2002 series Cell Divisions, in which cell-like yellow and white figures appear on a green background, arranged by the gentle but firm hand of transparent red rectangles, Maes created works permeated with a warm serenity. In her paintings, Maes appropriates images from the biomedical sciences and brings them to life again as soft and warm little bodies.
