Roland DEVOLDER
Drawings, paintings, sculptures
With :
Yannis MARKANTONAKIS
&
Alexis GORODINE
The profound and sublime art of Roland Devolder, outside dogma and without theology, with hints of witchcraft and bewitchment, is part of the vagabond flea market and fascinated contemplation. We navigate at night sight in the silent sanctuaries of the archaic and astonishing interior. […]
At night, not all the drawings are gray, and Roland Devolder, this digger of the abyss, enchants the expanse. From ghostly white to black drawings of opacity, endless are the passages in the land of greyness. The artist from Ostend, this city of salty mysteries, ignores excess, pathos and surge. Sober and stripped down, his art of deaf implosion haunts the dungeons of the soul. […]
We see incongruous appearances, […] processions of anonymous, grotesques, sinister pranksters and animal gods. The boat, the man and the fish are solitary islands which make the harsh and stripped world of Roland Devolder. “1 The paintings, sculptures and drawings gathered here showcase the immense talent of this transdisciplinary artist accompanied by his friend Yannis Markantonakis and Alexis Gorodine whose work is a permanent poetic quest linked to the traces of a parietal world.
1.Christian Noorbergen
Extract from Roland Devolder, fouilleur d’abîme, 2012
Flemish-born painter Roland Devolder (b.1938, Ostend) is the storyteller of a Saturnian world. Following in the footsteps of Ensor and Spilliaert, Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, he chose to give a plastic reality to his nocturnal visions. The masquerade features starving characters, between a lunar commedia dell’arte and carnival figures gathered in the theater of destiny. A bestiary accompanies this wandering humanity, transformed into grotesque appearances. Isolated or lost in a carnival procession, the man is by turns the surprising, ridiculous, strange or pitiful actor of a dreamlike universe between the irony of the representation and the nostalgia for a time gone. Nothing will be revealed to us in a story so little explicit. Is this the prologue or the epilogue of an initiatory scene? What mysterious symbol is hidden behind these masks, these bucranes taking the place of heads of characters mimicking a tangible reality? These acrobats reverse the natural order. The feeling of irrationality has superseded all logic. To describe and animate this whimsical world, Devolder resorts to a sober and stripped down palette, favoring the gray.
The whites possessing a supernatural light dialogue with the blacks and the twilight lands. This great designer reinforces the hallucinatory character of his painted works through graphics delving deep into the body and soul. Bronzes add volume to these compositions in a symbolist atmosphere that is striking in truth.
Lydia Harambourg Gazette de Drouot, Paris 2016
Where is the world at?
No one can answer this question.
Some see a collapse, others perceive a favorable development, through science, care, techniques …
Who would know how to have such a clairvoyance to feel without being mistaken in what state it is, this poor world, and where all this leads us? …
One vision seems clear to me, however, that of a fragmented world.
Neither free movement, nor instant contact, without borders can take away this feeling.
Inequalities, growing communalism, indiscriminate destruction, contradictory flows of information etc …
A loose, disunited world is – isn’t that the fairest face? …
In this explosion, this disorder, some artists manage to offer an almost peaceful vision by putting the pieces back together. Yanis Markantonakis is one of them.
Unlike a puzzle, each element has no innate link with those around it. In his “odds and ends”, as he calls them, Yanis manages to create a whole with dissimilar fragments.
The image he offers is each time a heavy boat, constant in his work, liner or ship, who knows? A boat made of uncertain assemblages of pieces of wood or other residues. This boat does not sink, it sails, despite everything, with confidence.
It seems that Yanis has this crazy ambition to fix our world so that it doesn’t go down.
Without really wanting it, he unites, he glues, he rereads, fragments which are so many pieces of our shattered world.
I believe that it is this improbable ordering which gives me the joy of discovering each time his assemblages which, like his paintings, arise from his intimate crash, itself a reflection of a world that he manages to straighten out in an almost ultimate effort …
It is this effort that I find beautiful. This effort of reconstruction, repair, rescue.
Art is now a word emptied of its meaning, of its blood, bloodless. Everything is art even nothing. So, in my eyes, beauty is the only question that is still valid. Yanis knows it. He knows it can be pulled out of everything, including old, poorly glued pieces of plank. His research is there. It offers us the beauty of a world, saved, for a moment …
Marc Perez, juin 2021
For several years, the former engineer Alexis Gorodine has preferred to swap his public works missions for the parietal traces of an imaginary world.
Archaeologist of the ephemeral, his writing takes shape over successive layers of dry pigments and lime applied to the canvases.
In his latest series, he revisits the history of art by inviting himself to Arles, in Van Gogh’s room with yellow walls transformed into a blue dream: he parodies Millet’s Angelus or the Sower, The Little Milkmaid. by Vermeer… or Matisse’s blue dance! As if he humorously wished to change the classification of an established order, the artist rewrites these masterpieces which he appropriates under his own label.
An atypical painter, the artist divides his time between the capital and his country house in the middle of the southwestern swamps. Lulled by the songs of the various species of birds of which he knows how to distinguish each note, he listens to and observes the red garza, the Hoopoe, the gray heron … around the flora and fauna of which he reproduces the effigies.
Engraving memories of the past, Alexis Gorodine – painter of time – immortalizes his universe with poetry.
Inviting a rereading of the past, his works are exhibited in the most famous museums of modern art in Paris, Caracas and New York.
Anne de Miller – La Cerda
Lettre du pays basque -13/05/202