With his solo exhibition All is Full of Love at Pizza Gallery, Michiel Ceulers turns representation into a form. Fully covered with white painted canvases, the interior of the gallery becomes an inverted void. Rather than being yet another total installation that challenges the authority of the ‘white cube’, Ceulers’ new project operates as a sort of unfolded template of the gallery space. While bringing the artist’s process-orientated abstraction to the next level, this ‘total painting’ is first and foremost a reflection on the limits of the medium.
Hardly distinctive from the distance, a grid of tiny white squares on the white canvases merges them into a wallpaper-like pattern. Flirting with the structural element of modernist painting, and yet depriving the works from their sacred autonomy, appealing to the mechanical reproduction but cherishing the tactile qualities of the painterly surface, Ceulers puts the game of contradictions at the core of his project. All is Full of Love is full of playful irony, inter-referential dynamics, and love for painting.
(by Ekaterina Vorontsova)
Artists: Michiel Ceulers