Grands Formats

ODRADEK residence, since more than eight years situated at 35 rue américaine, enlarges and opens a new location to present themed exhibitions and open an artists’ studio.

The new ODRADEK XL space, located at a 5 minutes’ walk from ODRADEK rue américaine, will allow visitors to move easily from one place to the other.

The public will be invited to discover large format works by artists participating in a common reflection.

From March 3, 2023 onwards, two parallel exhibitions will take place: “Large format” at 52 rue Paul Emile Janson, 1050 Brussels and “The Silent Adventure of Intervallic Spaces” at 35 rue américaine, 1060 Brussels.

About ODRADEK XL

Odradek means “out of the ordinary way” in Slavonic. Appearing in a short story by Franz Kafka, ‘The Family Man’s concerns’, Odradek, is a strangely constituted object that moves, appears, disappears, sometimes emits sounds within a rather ordinary family.

This strange appearance proposed by Kafka suits us, since Odradek suggests to go and see elsewhere, off the beaten tracks, and we will retain Kafka’s challenge to make the most inexplicable and unusual singularity universal.

In the spirit of our ASBL the dialogue with the public will be privileged by the presence of the artists in a workshop installed in the exhibition rooms. This presence, this availability of the artists is essential today. It favors the encounter, creates aesthetic affinities and creates different ways of seeing.

One question therefore seems essential to us: How to make the space alive? That question concerns the space of our exhibition rooms as well as the one of the studios and even more the one on which the artist works.

“Large Format”

Our new location, allowing us to exhibit large-scale works, is in line with ODRADEK approach. A first series of paintings invite us to participate in the graphs, glyphs, signs and other marks that Léo Baron, Zhang Dawo, Mouna Ikhlassy, Jipeng Ke, Christine Nicaise and Tianmeng Zhu inscribe on a material support with which they dialogue. “Large format” takes us imperatively into an existential encounter, that of the public and the artist via non-standard modes of communication.

The artists will present their path along graphic traces which they seek to liberate from the usual linguistic codes. These graphemes, these half-image half-word signs, neither images nor words, are part of an communication out of the ordinary, out of the “font” of characters. We are rather dealing with rhythmic beats, with visual and corporal poetry. The graphic lines assert themselves by the gesture and are realized in an existential, material dimension. They have the same magical power as the first writings, or as the incantatory formulas but also as the impulses of the body which responds to the vital energy that animates it.

By defending the art of the line as well as the dynamics and the rhythm that accompany it, the artists associated in this project seek to free us from the conditioning of academic and institutional knowledge.

The objective of the collective is to liberate the writing of the codes of legibility and find the texture of the matter, the real, or nature. The indecipherable writing presents a real challenge because we are dealing with the encounter between the drawing and the graph from their common denominator: the line. The rhythm of the line confronting the space of a surface invites us to think in images, outside the conventional framework of our knowledge.

A fifty-page catalogue will accompany the exhibition