Belgium

Antoine
Roegiers

Biography

Antoine Roegiers was born in Belgium in 1980. Three years later, his family moved to France, where he completed his studies at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2007. That same year, he won the Prix de la Fondation Roger Bataille, following up in 2012 with the Yishu 8 prize, leading to a three-month residency in Beijing. The 2012 – 2013 season was particularly rich for the artist, with exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, at Le Botanique in Brussels, at the Albertina in Vienna and at the São Paolo Biennial.

In 2014, his works have been exhibited at the Fondation d’Entreprise Glénat in Grenoble, at the Salon du Livre in Geneva, at the Château de Nyon, and at the Médiathèque du Fonds d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Petit Palais in Paris, the Harvard Art Museum and the Palacio Bellas Artes in Mexico among others. The artist has also won prizes for his short films. He lives and works in Paris.

About the artworks

Constantly navigating between traditional references and innovations, past and present, Antoine Roegiers finds inspiration in numerous sources. Using a variety of media, he explores the work of the great masters of the past, seen during his many visits to the Louvre and elsewhere, as well as the more private world of his family. Video installations, of which he produces every aspect himself, are one of the means he uses to animate works by the Flemish and Dutch painters linked to his roots in the Low Countries, giving them an inner life that viewers can usually only imagine. To the music composed by Antoine Marroncles, the figures come alive in their landscapes, as bizarre situations are played out before our eyes.

Roegiers also makes paintings and drawings of remarkable delicacy, usually in series. His Corps Enluminés, for example, were inspired by pen and brown ink drawings of The Seven Deadly Sins by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1558), and highlight the significant aspect of each sin through a prism that multiplies their presence.

The works are like illuminated miniatures teeming with precise details. Presented in the form of a kaleidoscope, each of these compositions develops outwards in masterly fashion from the centre. In what also looks like the kind of rose windows one could imagine decorating a surrealist Gothic church, the profane comes together with the sacred. The forms also recall the famous series by Maurits Cornelis Escher (20th century) in which figures spawn animals or strange hybrid forms and architectural forms interlock in impossible perspectives.

Also fascinated by Rubens and Velasquez, Antoine Roegiers explores old master art and infuses it with a touch of modernity, thus offering a new, surprising and fascinating vision of these works from the past, and creating original worlds that the viewer enters, as if being immersed in a dream.

The artworks

05

CORPS ENLUMINÉS, 2013

Ink on paper
7 parts, each 46 x 46 cm

CORPS ENLUMINÉS, 2013

Ink on paper
7 parts, each 46 x 46 cm

Le Ballet I (after Pierre Paul Rubens), 2014

Oil on canvas
193 x 97 cm

Le Porteur, 2015

Oil on canvas 162 x 130 cm

Le combat (after "Samson crushing lion’s jaws" by Pierre Paul Rubens), 2014

Oil on canvas
130 x 162 cm