ELASTIC REBOUND THEORY

It is with great pleasure that we announce the opening of Stephan Balleux and Irene Hanenbergh’s new exhibition ‘Elastic Rebound Theory’ at Ryan Renshaw Gallery.

Stephan Balleux is one of Belgium’s most exciting emerging artists.  Recognised for his “painting painting” approach, Balleux’s impressively formed conceptual figurative works have won him many awards including the prestigious Albert Camus prize in 2006. Stephan Balleux’s work explores issues of pictorial perception and the conceptual idea of painting. He is engaged in an exploration of painting’s identity and the place it holds in a contemporary art practice that is continually challenged by digital and virtual technologies. Far from denigrating or reacting against these new media, Balleux employs all available tools, old and new, in order to endlessly question the pictorial medium.

Irene Hanenbergh’s work manages to appear both old-world and otherworldly as it straddles a realm that exists between landscape and fantasy. 

Both Balleux and Hanenbergh’s works challenge the traditional notions and ideas of painting, providing the viewer with a drama of illusion and belief.

Melbourne-based artist Irene Hanenbergh creates a marginalised world in her striking new exhibition at Ryan Renshaw Gallery.  Looking at her work is like sneaking a peek through a tear in the time-space continuum: a microcosmic techno-universe populated by strange beasts unfurling itself in the viewer’s imagination. Irene’s signature medium is the zund print on aluminium. She deploys computer software to paint individual and miniscule brushstrokes onto a blank screen. This labour intensive method allows her to zoom in and out in order to paint in a precise and meticulous manner.

Hanenbergh transforms painting into a digital reproduction marked by the base elements of expressionism and the popular genres of horror and fantasy. Her work is bewitching.   She explores the fantastical, the unconscious and boundless depth of artistic creativity. Her prints incorporate elements of the new and the old – combining traditional art with modern computer technology.

At the core of Hanenbergh’s practice is an obsession with process:

The core of it is that I make a digital file as a completely blank image, there’s no other digital input of scans and so forth. Every pixel is basically painting as in ‘conventional’ painting.

Stephan Balleux is a Belgian artist now based in Berlin, Germany. Much like Irene, his work explores the position of painting in our digital age.  He employs various techniques (drawing, painting, sculpture, video and special effects) that constitute this ongoing investigation.

Balleux’s artistic research, which inscribes him to a post-modern pictorial tradition aims to produce specific sensations such as the distortion of the senses or the creation of a visual ambiguity within a pictorial practice. In order to do so, Balleux applies painting’s properties to other artistic media so that one or more of painting’s features emerge.  The results are voluntarily hybrid.  We are in front of a sculpture but it resembles a painting. We are watching a video but what we see is painting in movement. We are looking at a painting but it looks like a digitally manipulated photograph. We stand in front of a painting but it is actually a photograph of a painted sculpture.  Such is the ambiguity of Balleux’s work.