michel mouffe

Michel Mouffe (b. 1957, Belgium), a prominent figure in contemporary painting, has exhibited internationally since 1983 in Europe, the United States, and Asia. For Mouffe, painting is an existential pursuit, an act that engages the fundamental essence of human experience. His works are deeply contemplative, existing in a liminal space between presence and absence, interiority and exteriority. Mouffe reimagines the traditional boundaries of painting, creating surfaces that seem to breathe with subtle tension, evoking paradoxes of time and space. His forthcoming exhibition at Le Couvent de la Tourette, Le Corbusier, France - will further cement his ongoing exploration of light, silence, and spiritual transcendence.

Richeldis Fine Art is delighted to announce the opening exhibition of our flagship gallery in Sant Pere Mes Baix 64, 08003 Barcelona, showcasing the works of Michel Mouffe, Harry Morgan, and Marco Emmanuele. This landmark event will feature a dynamic dialogue  between three artists whose practices each explore the intersections of material, form, and history. On view till 24th November 2024.

Michel Mouffe is born in Brussels in 1957. His first exhibition was held at the end of a one year stay in a house by Le Corbusier that he used as a studio. He works and lives in Brussels (Be), Le Poet Laval (Fr) & Formentera (Es). Mouffe is represented by Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Belgium & Hong Kong . His works are present in international collections such as Buycksan Group Museum, Seoul, Korea; Axel Vervoordt Foundation, Antwerpen; M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium; Ixelles Museum, Ixelles, Belgium; Musée L, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium; PMMK Provincial Museum of Modern Art/ Mu.ZEE, Oostende, Belgium; Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Museum of Modern Art Collection, Brussels, Belgium.”

“To experience Mouffe's painting is to relate to this primordial form of an object not yet constituted as such. What makes it an artistic object is not only the materially determined and conscious thing, but the primary and unspeakable relationship with it, which, in turn, transforms us. By making the sensory experience of Mouffe's paintings, we are witnessing a disarmament of intentional consciousness by the thing itself. In his paintings, an advent of the distant is felt: the deployment of depths is never flattened. The painted space is always real, and reveals itself in appearance because it escapes fixity.

In this sense, to try to determine a work by a structure in fixed points is to be, already, late in relation to the origin of seeing. The temporality of the work is never acquired in that the artistic moment acts according to a seeing and not a seen: it is part of a continuity and not in a defined past that one could point the finger at. The notion of time implies the dynamic character of the aesthetic experience, which cannot be fixed. Among the chaos, ambiguity is the only way to regain the unity of painting.

This is also what makes it difficult to talk about it because, as Mouffe shows us, the mode of being of aesthetic experience is in fact pre-theoretical and pre-linguistic. A primordial tension irrevocably animates the canvas. Otherwise, the work would be flat, as if faithful to the form and the limits of its materiality. The sole purpose of Mouffe's work is the journey of its own constitution, and this is its very being. In a way, the work is only completed by the artist when it is capable of never reaching completion, understood here in the sense of a fixed end. The painter's work ends when the - in this sense definitive - separation of the brush from the canvas coincides with the birth of the work as a work. If we take this definition literally, it means that a painter never paints a work of art. The advent of the work excludes the painter, and the true artist is the one who knows how to withdraw to let it be.”

All the mornings of the world, Jeanne Mouffe. Further reading / Film