Michaël Borremans, The Journey (True Colours),
2002, courtesy Zeno X Gallery

Michaël Borremans, The Ceramic Salami, 2001,
private collection, Brussels

Michaël Borremans, Flattening a Hellhound, 2000,
private collection, courtesy Zeno X Gallery

Michaël Borremans, A Mae West Experience,
2002, private collection, Los Angeles

Hallucination and Reality

By Dan Tranberg

We’re all trained from childhood to read pictures like stories. But the pictures of Belgian artist Michaël Borremans don’t work that way. Full as they are with seemingly narrative elements, they’re deliberately befuddling. That’s part of what makes them so mesmerizing.

Borremans’ exhibition, “Hallucination and Reality,” on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through Sunday, Sept. 4, is a magnificent example of how an artist can take historical conventions and use them to make works that feel entirely new.

Drawing upon influences ranging from Renaissance drawing to Surrealism, Borremans creates hauntingly beautiful drawings and paintings that lure viewers like glass-encased gemstones.

Once inside, we discover a world in which things don’t quite make sense. Figures carry out indiscernible tasks, objects are depicted in such a way that their scale is exaggerated beyond reason, and architectural spaces defy the laws of gravity – not to mention logic.

This twisting of reality is not just a way for the artist to amuse himself; it’s a way to draw viewers into his drawings and paintings in order to appreciate them for what they are: wildly imaginative works of art.

Rather than creating stories, he combines disparate images so that they read like dreams or nightmares.

A painting from 2002 titled “A Mae West Experience,” for instance, shows a bust of the famous screen siren as if it were a public monument. Comparatively tiny figures appear to walk around the statue, though many are depicted as figurines, each mounted to a round base and therefore immobile. Though the implied space in the painting is wide open, the frame of a doorway appears on the periphery, as if leading viewers from one realm into another.

The show is Borremans’ first solo museum exhibition in the United States, and the Cleveland museum is its only American venue. It opened last fall in Switzerland and traveled to Belgium before opening in Cleveland on May 22.

Co-curated by Jeffrey Grove, who left his post as contemporary curator at the Cleveland museum to become curator of modern and contemporary art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Borremans exhibition is the largest show ever in the museum’s Project 244 series, which Grove initiated as a way of spotlighting new art.

It includes 63 small drawings and paintings, all created between 1995 and 2004.

Sprawling as it is, the show reveals Borremans as an exceptionally focused artist, especially considering that the earliest works on view were made when he was in his early 30s. He’s now 42.

For the past decade, he has been creating drawings and paintings using photographs as source material, extrapolating and combining images to create bizarre scenarios that often evoke issues of power and alienation. But they never communicate concrete messages.

Borremans, who was present at the opening reception, said he intentionally leaves his images open for interpretation and that he never starts them with a clear plan in mind.

As a result, his works often include notes and diagrams, reflecting his ongoing process of developing themes and ideas. He frequently reuses specific figures or objects in a number of works, which reinforces the sense that the viewer is experiencing a recurring dream.

Further tying all of his works together is his devotion to exquisite draftsmanship. Unlike most contemporary artists, he cherishes the skills and techniques of the old masters, and carries them forward with remarkable agility.

In light of the ongoing closings of the Cleveland museum’s permanent galleries, the Borremans exhibition is now the main attraction in terms of contemporary art at the museum this summer.

Delightfully puzzling as it is, it fits the bill beautifully.

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This article appeared in The Plain Dealer, June 6, 2005

© 2007 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.