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Artist: Antoine Roegiers

Belgian artist Antoine Roegiers is coming to Galerie Templon this autumn with the solo exhibition La Brûlure de l’Éveil/Burning Awakening. A series of seventeen oils on canvas centre on an exploration of a world in transition where nature reclaims what is hers.

Antoine Roegiers discovered the works of the masters of the Flemish School, from Peter Brueghel to Jérôme Bosch, as a student at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts. Fascinated by their highly distinctive vision of narrative, perspective, viewpoint, staging and time, Antoine Roegiers conjures up different universes, poetic, dreamlike, sometimes even humorous, resulting in tableaux that resemble the animation films he has become skilled in making.

Since 2018, Antoine Roegiers has been reflecting and working on a “visual narrative” project: a series of paintings which together tell a single story over several years. Humour, solemnity and poetry rub shoulders, offering us food for thought about today’s world as well as the chance to laugh at ourselves.

La Brûlure de l’Éveil plunges the visitor headfirst into an almost apocalyptic world. Gigantic flames, reflecting the climate emergency, set the sky ablaze above desolate landscapes criss-crossed by skeletons on their cart, tirelessly gathering the masks abandoned by reckless humans. They fight over this precious booty with a pack of determined dogs and some mischievous crows.

Antoine Roegiers subverts the codes of the traditional hunting scene: here the object of the hunt is artifice. It symbolises the world of appearances that humans have built. The masks have fallen. Thoughtlessness is a thing of the past. We can no longer close our eyes to the consequences of our actions. Tomorrow’s problems are here.

“My canvases are a space open to the imagination and to interpretation of all possibilities. I want to explore a world that doesn’t exist and bring it to life with my brush and my pigments dipped in oil, to make it plausible with dreamscapes that form a visual narrative. It’s an ongoing dream, the paintings are interlinked and follow on from each other to form a coherent whole, as I see it: an open narrative thread, chronologically changeable and endless.”

Born in 1980 in Belgium, Antoine Roegiers lives and works in Paris. He fuses his knowledge of classic painting with contemporary animation techniques. Putting technology and his talent for drawing to good use, he breathes life into fantastical characters typical of the Flemish masters, taking liberties with them and inventing stories that never stay still.

His work has been shown in a range of solo exhibitions, including at the Noordbrabant Museum in Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, France, in 2012 and Botanique in Brussels in 2013. His art has also featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Frissiras Museum in Athens (2003), Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard in Paris (2009), Kulturhuset Museum in Stockholm (2012), Petit Palais in Paris (2013), Palais Pisztory in Slovakia (2013), Paço das Artes in Sao Paulo (2013), Albertina Museum in Vienna (2013), Fonds d’art contemporain de la ville et du canton de Genève (2013), Bruce Museum in Greenwich, USA (2015), Palacio Bellas Artes and Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City (2018), Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (2019), Cité de la musique Philharmonie in Paris (2021) and MO.CO in Montpellier (2023). It is also included in the Fonds d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Genève and Collections du Ministère de la Communauté Française de Belgique. Antoine Roegiers has won several prizes, including the Molière de la Création Visuelle (2020) and Prize Foundation Roger Bataille (2007).