Anastasia Bay’s paintings present scenes borrowed from theater, opera or the carnivalesque scenes of Ensor or Brueghel the Elder. Her characters embody the irony of overturning society’s established roles and norms at these moments of popular gathering. Bay’s work is all about contrast and balance in a very cathartic way. The choice of a precise fragment of reality in her works dissolves any narration. The mysterious, sometimes disturbing characters are caught in vibrant movements, blurring the lines of their barely sketched bodies and faces. There is a search for simplicity in her gesture, seeking for the essence of the being she is depicting. She shares with Philip Guston or Gérard Gasiorowski a bluntness in the works and the ability to express very vivid emotions through a very simple and assertive line.

Emmanuel Beguinot approaches his practice as both an introspective and cathartic exercise. His dynamic creative process combines the intuitive application of mixed media on paper with a retrospective framing gesture developed in collaboration with Celeste Burlina. The frames in question are turned over and reworked, mimicking the awkward, off-putting, and prosaic vocabulary of an imagination that both stains and sublimates the scenes or portraits depicted within the works. While violence holds a central place in Beguinot’s work, it operates above all under the aegis of an attempt — that of the courage of truth. Flaws, accidents, and overflows are received with reverence; a way of accrediting the rough edges of our intimacies and social interactions through the staging of the theater of the absurd we collectively inhabit. In Beguinot’s works, the reverse side of the stage acquires a subversive dimension, one indexed to laughter in its most grotesque form. In doing so, he conveys the necessity of externalizing — in an embodied and enthusiastic way — the weight of a buried, often neglected imagination which, in its effort to manifest itself, opens onto the search for a certain stability.

Keunmin Lee’s paintings transcribe the sensations experienced during hallucinatory episodes, plunging us into deep compositions with rich red hues, inside a body without limits or exteriority. About twenty years ago, Keunmin Lee was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a term that covers a very broad spectrum, from instability in relationships and self-image to extreme sensitivity to his environment. This diagnosis was, in essence, a form of cold definition that offered no space for alternative interpretations beyond the diagnostic label and its corresponding code, a rigid and unyielding categorization reducing an identity to an illness. For Lee, painting is an introspective and emancipatory practice in the face of this process of rationalization and quantification of sensitive, immaterial experiences. This opens the way for him to reappropriate his illness and resist social categorization, dissociating himself from art brut (outsider art) through his constant self-reflection. He paints his hallucinations in such a way as to affirm their creative and subversive potential, giving them a positive aspect rather than reducing them to the status of mere symptoms. Systems - blood, digestive, organic - thus become a metaphor for social systems, digesting, grouping individuals to obtain what they need to function, to the detriment of each person’s individuality and differences. Omnipresent in Keunmin Lee’s canvases, the body is crudely revealed to better escape norms and appeal to our deepest interiority.